Home : Articles : System Restore Cleanup
Is your Windows box's hard drive getting uncomfortably full? This quick tip might help, at least a bit. This article describes, step by step, how to use Disk Cleanup to remove old System Restore points.
Before doing this, you should be aware that this will make it impossible to use System Restore to go back to earlier past states; only the most recent restore point will be kept. If that's OK with you, follow these instructions to free what is often quite a decent chunk of space.
What to do
First, bring up the Properties dialog for the drive in question (for example, by right-clicking the drive in My Computer):
Notice the Disk Cleanup button; click it. A progress dialog appears:
while Windows spends an inordinately long period of time agonising over the amount of space each option, including those you don't want to use, will free (this is why the Command Line is better, but only on operating systems with good shells). After a little while, you see the Disk Cleanup dialog:
There might be a few things in this list you can clean up; Temporary Internet Files, Temporary Files and Recycle Bin are good obvious ones if it looks like you can make a decent saving there.
To proceed with clearing old System Restore points, click the More Options tab:
Notice the bottom frame, System Restore. If you click the Clean up button here, you'll get this confirmation dialog:
If you click Yes here, Windows will go into one of its glitchy partially hung states for a good few seconds, after which you should find your disk has a good bit more free space available.
Not to state the obvious, but ...
Of course, removing files you don't need will probably save more than any Disk Cleanup tip; consider throwing some things you access rarely onto an external drive or writing them to optical media.
