Excluding system restore points

My 100GB Vista partition has 15GB allocated to system restore points, which significantly affects archive file size. I would like to exclude these, but is there a way in ATI 11?

 

Earthling:

I am forgetting whether you can exclude files in an image with TI version 11. If you can, use the method in post #5 of this thread.

 

Mark can he not just turn off system restore before doing an image, to zero it and then turn it back on after.

Another way would to change the size of system restore in "vssadmin list shadowstorage" I have mine set to 1 gig using vista. ( I always seem to forget to turn off system restore when I make an image and found this works better for me).
When I copy an image I always clean up temp/unecessay files, clean the registry, clean out a lot of old email, do a disk cleanup, defrag, scan for virus etc. ( I only image once a month).

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I used vssadmin to set my System Restore space to its maximum of 15GB and I don't want to turn it off as I would, for a while anyway, lose the ability to restore earlier versions of my files (with ShadowExplorer).

I'll try the suggested method of excluding the vss and let you know how it compares.

 

Wow, worked a treat! Image of C: with the vss space excluded is 20.3GB compared with 25.2GB this morning.

Off topic I know, but if you are using a 'consumer' version of Vista then ShadowExplorer will give you access to all earlier versions of your files for as far back as you have System Restore points available. AFAIK Ultimate and Business have this capability as standard.

 

Doug:

Yes, but you will lose the restore points immediately. If you want to keep the restore points on the hard disk but just not include them in your backup image then excluding them is the way to go.

For example, I have 6 GB reserved for VSS storage on my data partition that has previous versions of files going back about 2 months. I find these very useful so I would not want to delete them. However, there is no sense including them in the image because they make the image file larger and they won't survive restoration, so I would exclude them if I could (I can't because TI version 10 doesn't have that feature).

 

Out of curiosity, how much space is currently used in the 15 GB of space that you have reseved for VSS? From an elevated command prompt:

Code:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Is it 4.9 GB?

 

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C: )\\?\Volume{d1506074-12df-11de-aca5-806e6f6e6963}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C: )\\?\Volume{d1506074-12df-11de-aca5-806e6f6e69
63}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 11.543 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 11.943 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 15.001 GB

 

OK, so when TI does include the VSS files they get compressed substantially from 11.5 GB to 4.9 GB. Just curious -- thanks.

 

Yeah, and if Marat is looking in he will have learned something too