Reduce, Increase or Change the Maximum Allocated Shadow Copy (System Restore) Space Size In Vista

Reduce, Increase or Change the Maximum Allocated Shadow Copy (System Restore) Space Size

Syntax:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=[drive]: /For=[drive]: /Maxsize=[size]

For example, to limit the usage of VSS backup files which include System Restore files and Previous Versions file to 5 gigabytes on the C: drive, with the storage space for these files located on drive C: too, use the following command:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=C: /For=C: /MaxSize=5GB

The value for MaxSize must be at least 300MB or greater and accepts the following suffixes:

KB, MB, GB, TB, PB and EB (well, th last few sort of a joke as if you have such many space to spare you won??t worry about how much space VSS is using).

If a suffix is not supplied, MaxSize will treat the value entered as bytes.

If you intend to set no limit to the amount of space VSS System Restore and Shadow Copy can use, leave out MaxSize parameter, and the max will be set to unbounded.

But before you shrink or reduce the disk space limit for VSS, remember that VSS is used by both System Restore and the useful Previous Versions (Shadow Copy) feature, where you can retrieve and recover deleted files, or accidentally/wrongly modified files by restoring the saved copy or ??previous version?? of the file or document.

So if you reduce the space it able to use, unavoidable the generation and number of the files that can be backed up are also reduced.