June 17th, 2008
10 top Vista tweaks, part 2
8. Make the most of System Restore and shadow copies
System Restore may be the single most misunderstood feature in Windows Vista. Although the name and basic interface are the same as the System Restore feature in Windows XP, the technical underpinnings have changed dramatically. If you’re following advice originally written for XP, you might want to rethink some of your decisions.
First, a little background. In Windows XP, the primary purpose of System Restore was to help you recover from problems caused by incompatible drivers, bad DLLs, and registry errors. To help you roll back those changes, the system took regular “snapshots” of the system state, each of which required a relatively small amount of space. As a result, on a Windows XP system you could easily have access to System Restore snapshots going back weeks or months.
In Vista, those snapshots are taken by the Volume Shadow Copy Service, which also keeps track of changes to data files for the Previous Versions feature. At regular intervals, the system makes a block-level comparison of every change made to the volume (that’s Windows-speak for a drive or partition identified by a drive letter). Those changes are stored in the extraordinarily well-hidden System Volume Information folder, with default permissions that allow access only to the System account. Shadow copies ignore large system files that don’t require backup, such as the pagefile, hibernation file, and offline message stores for Exchange accounts. But it tracks changes for just about every other kind of file. As a result, the snapshots typically take up much more space than their XP counterparts, but the benefit is that you can often recover an old version of a deleted, changed, or damaged file without having to look far.
The Previous Versions user interface in Windows Explorer is available only on Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions. If you use Home Basic or Home Premium edition, however, you’re a second-class citizen. Although Vista creates those shadow copies, their contents are not available for easy retrieval. But a crafty third-party developer has stepped up with a utility that lets you access those files on any Vista system.
On any computer running Windows Vista, I make sure to check (and if necessary, tweak) three settings. Here’s how you can do the same:
- Make sure that restore points are automatically created on every drive that needs protection. This setting is available via the System option in Control Panel. The Automatic restore points list on the System Protection tab shows every drive that has a drive letter and is formatted with the NTFS file system. A check mark means that shadow copies are being created on that drive. I recommend that you always enable automatic restore on the system volume. For drives that contain only data files, select the check box if you want to be able to recover previous versions of files as needed; clear the check box if the files are regularly backed up elsewhere and you don’t need additional backups via shadow copies.
- Fine-tune the amount of space that shadow copies use. In Windows XP, you did this with a slider. In Vista, this setting can be adjusted to a specific size by opening a Command Prompt window and running vssadmin resize shadowstorage. Most versions of this tip that I’ve seen at other sites assume you want to reduce the amount of space used. However, under some circumstances you might want to allocate extra space for shadow copies. Vista initially allocates 15% of the drive space, or 30% of available free space, whichever is less, for storing shadow copies. On a system volume that is 149GB in size, the initial size of the volume shadow storage is roughly 20GB. If you store data files on a separate partition, you could easily increase the volume shadow copy space to 30GB or even 40GB. That tweak greatly increases the likelihood that you’ll be able to recover from a problem or restore a file using Previous Versions. (On the illustrated step-by-step instructions for this tweak, I show how to use this command line to increase the volume shadow space on the C: drive. For details on alternative ways to manage shadow copies, see Vista Hands On #16: A smarter way to manage System Restore space.)
- For systems running home editions of Windows Vista, install the free ShadowExplorer utility. It runs as a stand-alone program and allows you to open any shadow copy and retrieve files or folders from it. The interface is not as slick as what you get with Windows Explorer, but if you’re desperately seeking a valuable file that you inadvertently trashed two weeks ago, you won’t care about the rough edges.
I also make it a point to check System Restore settings every week or two just to verify that everything is working as expected. For fast access, create a shortcut using the command Systempropertiesprotection.exe, which opens the System Control Panel with the correct tab already selected.
Tweak #9: Add network shortcuts to the Computer window –>
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/17/08
