Is it safe to delete 200+GB of "WindowsImageBackup"?

After repeated nagging by Windows 7, I let it create a system restore point or whatever it is on my external hard drive. To my surprise, it’s now mostly full - one folder taking up 206 GB of space! That’s more that’s on my main HDD, so what the hell Windows is doing with it I’ve no idea. Can I safely delete this absurd space hog? Google gives conflicting reports.

You’d be better off just shutting System Restore back off for the drive, which should automatically remove any files that the service uses.

And in what way is Windows nagging about that drive? I don’t see any indication at all except when I try to restore something. And you can avoid that by removing the hard drive before attempting a restore. Or do what I do and just ignore it.

The action centre kept popping up in the bottom left telling me to create a system restore point, so I went ahead with it. If I’d have known it would be over 200 gigabytes I’d have laughed it out of town.

I opened up the backup centre thing, turned off the schedule and told it to delete everything. My external HDD is now back to reasonable size, hopefully it stays that way. 200 gb! Absolute insanity.

That’s not a restore point, it’s a backup. Restore points are under \System Volume Information. And you absolutely should back up - to an external hard drive.

Restore point? Or Backup? Those are two completely different things…

Assuming it was a backup (restore points are actually quite small, and usually only kept on your boot drive, and kept only in “leftover” drive space…), then it could easily be larger than the content of your hard drive because it keeps track of older versions of files.

So if you have file A, which is 500 MB, and it’s backed-up. Then you open it and add another 200 MB of data, the backup will have a total of 1200 MB of space used-- 500 MB for the original file, + 700 MB for the new file. (Of course it’s not quite this simple, there’s file compression and some de-duplication, but… the example is to illustrate the point.

ETA: Also, of course you WANT a backup! If you don’t want Windows doing it for you, you can use a service like DropBox or Mozy. But don’t go without a backup!

Yeah, you want a backup, but chances are you don’t want to take a drive you normally use out of commission just for that. If you’re going to use the big backup, then use a separate drive, and use imaging type software so you can restore instantly back to where you were.

If, on the other hand, you are like most people who only have a few important files and a few programs that have to be installed, then just keep a backup of those important files, possibly online. These backup solutions that do a mish-mash of both really aren’t worth too much: They take up a lot of space, but you still don’t get quite back to where you were.