Update: We’ve also covered how to limit system restore’s disk usage in Windows 7.
The utility to change the settings is a command line utility called vssadmin. You’ll have to open a command prompt in administrator mode by entering cmd into the start menu and hitting Ctrl+Shift+Enter, or right-clicking the command prompt and selecting Run as Administrator.
Show Allocated System Restore Size
Type in the following command into the prompt:
As you can see in the screenshot, System Restore is taking up 2.2 GB on my system.. and I just reinstalled!
Changing the Allocated System Restore Size
To change the maximum size on the disk that System Restore will use, you will need to type in the following command:
You can change the /for and /on to match the drive that System Restore is enabled on, and you can set a different size for the max size. I chose 3GB for the sake of this example, but you could also limit it to 500MB or something else if you wanted to.
If you have plenty of disk space, I’d recommend leaving the values alone, but if you are running low on space, this is a quick way to help the problem.
