Have you ever noticed that something other than your files seems to be eating away at your drive space? If you’re an uber-nerd like myself, you may have indeed selected all your folders in explorer, viewed their properties and wondered why the total is lower than the total space in use on the drive. Time to demystify!
When you install new software, run patch updates or setup new devices, Windows may automatically create a system snapshot before making changes to the system. Should something stop working, you then have the option to roll back the changes to one of these snapshots using system restore. Depending on your settings, Windows may also keep copies of files like your documents or pictures, which you can roll back to earlier versions.
The net effect of all of these “backups” is redundancy but less available drive space. If your system is working perfectly and you feel like freeing up some space, it might be time to take the plunge and wipe the shadow copy slate clean. Indeed, you potentially stand to gain many gigabytes of space depending on your settings. For example, on one of my RAID drives, system protection is set to use up to 1% of the drive, but that actually equates to an astounding 37GB!
There are essentially two options for reclaiming this space from the shadow copy void – you can choose to remove all restore points, or you can keep the newer ones and remove only the oldest restore points.
To remove the oldest shadow copies
Click the Windows (or Start) button and type cmd into the search box. Press “Ctrl + Shift + Enter” to open a command prompt as Administrator. You may be prompted by UAC – if so, click Yes. At the command prompt type the following:
vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /oldest
This will wipe the oldest shadow copies on drive C:. If you have another hard drive on which you wish to do the same, simply substitute the drive letter where you see “c:” in the command.
To remove all shadow copies
Click the Windows (or Start) button and type cmd into the search box. Press “Ctrl + Shift + Enter” to open a command prompt as Administrator. You may be prompted by UAC – if so, click Yes. At the command prompt type the following:
vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /all
This will wipe all shadow copies on drive C:. If you have another hard drive on which you wish to do the same, simply substitute the drive letter where you see “c:” in the command.
