Clean Up after System Restore

Obviously, SR creates a number of restore points, and one significant drawback with this technology is that the restore points take up disk space on your hard drive. Especially if you have a laptop, this drive space can be precious.

Fortunately, cleaning up after the restore points isn't much of a chore. In fact, we previously visited the utility that can do this back in Chapter 4, "Disk and File System Management."

It's the Disk Cleanup utility, and one of its options allows you to remove all restore points except for the most recent one. You can accomplish this Disk Cleanup in a number of ways; here's the one I prefer:

1.	Right-click the volume you're cleaning, choose Properties, and then choose the Disk Cleanup button.
2.	From the Disk Cleanup dialog box, click the More Options tab.
3.	The last button of the dialog box is titled "Clean up…" As shown in Figure 13-14, click the button, and you will then verify that you're deleting all restore points except for one. Figure 13-14. Manually removing restore points.
4.	Click Yes, and then click OK in the Disk Cleanup dialog box to complete the operation.

Further, you can constrain the amount of space the System Restore points are allowed to occupy on your hard drive. In the System Restore section of the Help and Support Center, there's a System Restore Settings hyperlink.

When you click this hyperlink, it will launch the System Properties Control Panel applet (which you could just as easily launch from there as well) with the System Restore tab selected.

You can then configure System Restore drive space settings on a volume-by-volume basis. Just select the drive to configure and choose the Settings button. You get a Settings dialog box shown in Figure 13-15. Use the slider to set the percentage of drive space allocated for System Restore point storage.

Figure 13-15. Reclaim disk space from the clutches of System Restore.

If you're feeling macho, you can just turn the whole thing off.