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Does anyone know the reason for system restore taking up more drive space after a few days? I'm not making any new restore points but it still seems to increase in size. For example, I make a restore point that's like 600 MB then I check back in a few days and the used disk space from restore points increased to 25 GB. I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium.

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What your seeing is space being taken up by both "Restore Points" and "Previous Versions" of files - both of which are stored in the same folder.

"Previous Version" file copies get made regularly by default in Win7.

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What files actually get get backed up to previous versions? Is it really enough to use 30 GBs of disk space after only a few days? – Aznfin Dec 31 '09 at 5:26
The Previous Versions affect practically every file/folder on the hard drives. Go right click a folder and select "Restore Previous Versions" and you'll see what shadows exist for that folder. The Previous version get cleaned up as you need the space, so they're not a big deal. My Win 7 system has about 30GB of space (12% of each drive) being used right now as well. Previous Versions has saved my butt a few times, it's worth it. ;) – techie007 Dec 31 '09 at 15:48
Perhaps I'll just keep system restore using 15% of my drive again. Now that I understand how useful previous versions can be. Thanks for the explanation it was just what I was looking for. – Aznfin Jan 1 '10 at 16:03
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Do you have automatic updates on?

Windows automatically creates restore points before updates are applied incase of failure (Which is good - Windows 7 is VERY good at recovering from failures).

After this, most installations now also create automatic restore points.

If this is a problem, you can look in Control Panel > System Properties (Windows Flag+Pause/Break), then click System protection on the left. Click the Configure button and you can manually control the space usage.

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I don't have automatic updates on and usually when I check CCleaner for new system restore points after Windows Update and other installations I don't find any new restore points. – Aznfin Dec 31 '09 at 4:17
Then how do you know it is system restore taking up the space... Where are you seeing this? Can you post a screenshot? – William Hilsum Dec 31 '09 at 4:37
Well I check System Restore > Configure in system properties and view the used disk space. It just magically increases for some reason. I also tend to check my hard drive a lot and my free space decreases. When I comes to disk space I'm always looking for ways to free up used space. – Aznfin Dec 31 '09 at 4:44
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