Vista's system restore

Is there anyway to specify which files that Vista's system restore makes a backup of? My "recovery" partition has 15G of disk space and it was nearly filled the first time I created a restore point.

 

The recovery partition has nothing to do with Vista's restore. It's created by your OEM at the factory, and contains all the information required to perform a full recovery on your computer. A full recovery means that it will reinstall the whole system to the state it was when you took it out of the box. All of your data and programs will be gone if you do that.

If you have not done so already, you should make the recovery DVDs using the software that came with your system. There should be a program that allows you to burn all of those files to a DVD that is bootable and you can use it to restore if you have a serious problem with the system.

System restore is stored on the C: drive and is limited to use %15 of the disk space on C:

 

Yes, exactly.

And as the disk fills up, Vista will shrink the amount of space Systerm Restore is allowed to use (by deleting old restore points). So it's best not to worry about it unless you need more space immediately.

As for your recovery partition... if you make the recovery DVDs, you can delete that partition if you want to and reclaim the space.

 

I'm not sure I understand completely. On the control panel there is a "backup and restore center". When I create a backup point it saves my files to recovery drive "D". What files am I backing up when I create this "backup point"? Is the "D" drive a partition on my HD? Do I want to take this information created when making a backup point to a DVD?

Thanks for the help.

 

I think you may have previously misunderstood the purpose of the restore partition (D and configured the backup system to use that drive to store backups on. There's nothing wrong with this, but as you see now there's not a lot of space there and you are running into the limitation.

The recovery partition is not something that comes with Vista at all. It is there because whoever you bought the laptop from put it there, so it is not a standard feature (but it does exist on many computers running Vista).

The recovery partition is still on the same hard drive as all of your other data, it's just in a different section. That's good in case you delete something and need to get it back, but if the hard drive crashes or your computer gets stolen, it will not help you. It is a good idea to buy an external disk drive and use that for backups instead of the D: drive. The reason for this is that most data these days is too big to fit on one DVD, so backing up to DVD will use a lot of discs and create more plastic waste in the long run.

 

How is this done, Swarmer?