All good things have limitations: Mainly the maximum ‘Disk Space Usage’ set aside for system protection. Set this value too small (in percentage of total disk space) and the earliest restore point gets bumped too soon as it is replaced by the newest restore point and associate shadow copy backup. Even setting the ‘Max Usage’ value to 20% (51GB) which is what I did for my Windows 255GB Windows partition. This may seem like a lot of space but still may not be enough for users who store a lot of photos or videos. Documents yes, photos maybe. The documents (Word, Excel, .pdf, .txt and VB script files) use up only 2GB. My photos however consume an additional 44GB.
To increase this value from the default of 7% (about 7GB) to 20% would give me a total 51GB or barely enough for one system restore point. The next time a new restore is created the previous restore point would be deleted, leaving nothing in the way of an earlier shadow copy backup of my documents to restore a document from, which is why my photos are located on another hard drive.
However if you are not storing a large amount of photos or family videos then you can increase the space allocated as follows:
1) Click ‘Start’ and in the search box enter:create restore point.
Click on ‘Create a restore point’ from the list.
2) Choose the Windows 7 partition (C:) and click on ‘Configure’.
3) Move the ‘Max Usage’ slider to the right.
4) Click the ‘Apply’ button and then click ‘OK’ and ‘OK’ to accept, exit and close the ‘System Protection’ window.
You now have addition disk space reserved for shadow copy backups and system restore points.
Change when System Restore points are created ----->
