Re: EASY question for MVPs ..Or others..

From: cquirke (MVP Win9x) (cquirkenews_at_nospam.mvps.org)
Date: 02/04/04 

Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 11:28:29 +0200

On Sun, 01 Feb 2004 09:27:09 -0800, "Michael L. Arends"

>Gotta Love that system restore. It has saved my Bacon on SEVERAL times.

What are you doing that causes so much trouble? :-)

>I was just wondering if there was anyway or any place, I could define
>for it to delete all but the oh ..say last "THREE" restore points?

As mentioned, there's no way - SR is just too inflexible by design.

You can approximate the same effect either by managing SR manually,
and/or crunching down on the space it is allowed to consume.

As a performance/efficiency fan, you have prolly discovered the joys
of partitioning the HD into multiple volumes. If your approach is to
store core code and apps only on C:, or C: and D: say, then you could
disable SR on other volumes.

That helps massively when it comes to shovelling around wads of other
system's HD contents, otherwise SR beats itself to death every time
you drop or delete a wad of such material (packed as it is with
monitored files that SR is too stupid to realise have to system
relevance). But there's a fly in the ointment there.

Every time you add a new HD to the system, SR will enable itself for
the additional drive letters - and you can't "pre-book" SR-disable in
such cases. Of course it also duhfaults to wasting as much HD space
as possible in such cases. So you should either disable SR for those
volumes before doing anything else, or disable SR altogether.

If the dropped-in HD is also from XP, SR will probably kill that
installation's SR data. The best chance of avoiding that is to
disable SR on all drives (yes, that discards *your* SR data) before
dropping in the HD. SR is not always your friend.

We are moving into an age of hot-swappable S-ATA HDs, and MS urgently
needs to get the clue that just because a HD is visible on the local
system, does NOT mean it is "part of" that system and should be
stomped on. Respect, MS please; respect!

Manual SR means keeping it off generally (or preventing auto-creation
of restore points) until just before you do something hairy. As a
savvy performance/efficiency fan, I assume you know when that is <g>
...then enable it and make a manual restore point before proceeding.
After trouble-free mileage for a while, disable SR again, etc.

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  Dreams are stack dumps of the soul
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