Backup and Restore in W7 producing massive system images

[kissenger]

It seems like MS have made some big changes to System Restore lately. I'm sure it used to only takeup less than 10GB no matter how much of my hard drive I was using. I just reenabled it after updating and it made a disc image that's around 8GB and a folder WindowsImageBackup that's neary 100GB.

Is there any way to set it up so it takes less space? And can I just delete these new files on my secondary drive that Restore has made?

 

[mrk]

How do you expect to get a system image of your OS drive at 8GB? That's just barely a clean install with nothing but Windows updates installed?

A System Image will be as big as the used space on the system drive. In my case I'm using 122GB on the C drive so my system images are a bit bigger than that.

Backup and Restore will simply overwrite previous system images if it finds that an image of the same system drive already exists at that same location as well. Sounds to me like you're doing an incremental backup and including a system image with each increment as opposed to just a system image.

Personally I create a system image only once a month. The VHD it creates can be browsed like a drive using the freeware utility VHD Attach if you need to pull files off.

 

[kissenger]

I don't expect to get a system image. That's the thing. I just want to be able to use Restore like it used to be, where it would only take a few GB and would let you roll back if you installed something and something went wrong.

 

[mrk]

Oh you're on about System Restore, not Backup and Restore (2 different applications).

Configure it via system properties:

 

[this_is_gav]

Yeah, I think you're confusing the two. One makes entire system images (Backup and Restore), the other (System Restore) allows the rolling back of specific files and hives and allows you to set a specific percentage of space to limit it if needed.

 

[kissenger]

Thanks guys. That's the reason.