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Reclaiming disk space from “system volume information”

Windows saves information related to system restore inside that place and it is used when you actually perform a restoration. But when struggling for more disk space, I am sure you wouldn’t mind doing a trade off between what portion of your disk you want to give away for that purpose and what portion you want to keep for yourself.

Now here are some commands that you could use in the Command Prompt console in administrator mode in order to view and resize the space allocated for SVI “system volume information”:

1. To see the space allocated and used for SVI:

– Open Command Prompt with “Run as Administrator” option

– Type in: vssadmin list shadowstorage

– You will see Used Space, Allocated Space and Maximum Space for SVI

2. To see the restore information stored therein:

– Use in the same console command: vssadmin list shadows

3. To resize the maximum allocated space:

– Type in command: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[here add the drive letter]: /For=[here add the drive letter]: /Maxsize=[here add the maximum size]

– E.g., vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=4GB

– You will see a prompt confirming resize done

– You can check the status again using the command discussed in point 1 above

4. Just to get rid of the space already consumed, but sticking to the same size of max-size as before:

– Do actions as per point 3 to set the max-size t, say, 1GB

– If you check now, most likely you’ll see that used space is now 0KB

– Do the resize again and set it back to what it was before

– Check your disk space availability in Windows Explorer, you should see the reclaim is done!

Hope this helps.

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Categorised as: Microsoft, Server OS