On my coputer which is Windows Vista, I have two drives.
My “C” drive (contain the computer’s O/S and my applications) and “D” drive (system recovery). This physically is one drive, partitioned in two.
I have a seperate physical drive in the computer called “S” (for storage.)
When Vista makes it’s nightly restore point, it makes one for the “C” drive and the “S” drive.
If I am not mistaken, and I may be, the system restore only restores system files, not “storage files.”
What I have on my “S” drive is a back of of my CDs and my DVDs and my photos.
So it seems like I am wasting space on the “S” drive by alloting so much for a bunch of restore points, right?
Again the “S” drive is a seperate physical hard drive from the other drive which is “C” and “D”
I know how to stop Vista from making restore points on the “S” drive, I was just wondering if there is any reason to even have them there anyway, since it’s all storage of files (Movies, music, photos, documents)
It is not entirely clear, but I think you are probably confusing “restore points” with “backups”. Restore points are to restore Windows to an earlier state after changes have been made to the OS. Sometimes the changes (such as those involved in installing a new program) cause problems, and you will want to go back to an earlier state of Windows. They will not normally be made “nightly” and should only involve your system drive (C: ). Backups are to save your data in case a drive fails. You do want to have backups of what is on your S drive, but these should not be on the S drive itself. Perhaps what is happening is that your computer is backing up data from C: to S:.
In any case, in my opinion having more than two or three restore points or data backups saved is overkill. You should be able to set things up so that older restore points and backups are deleted as new ones are created.
You can create restore points for non-system drives in Windows, but I really don’t see a reason for it. I was surprised when I saw that it could even be done.
If you have one physical hard drive or two or three, or whatever, the system restore on Windows always sets aside a certain percentage. You can change this.
To see this, go to start -> and type (without qoutes) “create a restore point”
Then about halfway down it says “Protection settings”
It’ll tell you your available drive(s) and you can choose which ones to make restore points for. By default it sets them all to have a restore point. Here is where you can also change the space allotted.
I never thought about it till now by my partition recovery is also making a restore point on that drive.
It has nothing to do with a back up. At least that is what I"m getting out of the OP
That seems to be true, but I do not understand what there is to be “restored” on a non-system drive. A restore point is not going to get corrupted data files back, right? I don’t think the OP needs restore points on his S or D drives at all, and he does not need many on his C drive.
Also, I remain baffled by the reference to “nightly” restore points. I am pretty sure that Windows only creates a restore point once a week (or when some change to the OS or the registry is made, such as when certain programs get installed, or if you tell it to make one manually). AFIK there is not a way to schedule it more frequently, even if you you wanted to (and why would you?). Automatic nightly backups I can understand, but nightly restore points? On all drives?
Restore points on data drives are used to make shadow copies of the files, which can be used to recover previous versions of the file if it gets corrupted, or you change and save a file, then later want to go back to the original for some reason. Or if you delete a file and empty the recycle bin or have it turned off. More info.