if you're running out of disk space and you have lots of ram, turning off hibernation is also useful. Also run disk cleanup in administrator mode.

I've never had a restore point be useful, so I just turned them off entirely.

I've also never used restore points. Sometimes they can be more trouble than they're worth (based on what I've read back in the early days of when it was introduced in Windows).
The key this is to just make sure you back up your documents, pictures, etc. on a regular basis (this does require some discipline because, one tends to get a bit "lazy").

I usually make an image after a fresh installation and, should something fail, I just restore the image and copy back my documents.
To set up the the rest doesn't take that long.

Also, using a 3rd party disk clean up utility tends to identify more "remnants" of old registry entries, temporary files, etc. than what the standard disk cleanup utility does in Windows.

I've found restore points to be extremely useful, specifically for when a driver installation fails badly. I've saved myself from complete reinstalls THREE times over the past few years thanks to them. (Mind you, one of those three times was immediately after installing Windows 8 for my first time, which went very quick, so doing a complete reinstall at that point wouldn't've taken much longer.)

But still, 100 GB of restore points in just two years... that's kinda crazy to think about... :o

I'm sure there's gotta be at least a few people on here who weren't aware of just how much space those restore points would ultimately accumulate to. ;)

I do routine backups as well. Most files go onto a 128 GB USB flash drive I have, though videos I've made have been going on DVDs, though with the switch to HD, DVDs rapidly became obsolete and I'm having to look into BD-Rs now. (Fortunately, I planned ahead for this when I built my computer; It has a BD-RE drive!) Keeping backups is one thing but the time it takes to restore a system following a major crash and reformat is extreme, so restore points add a layer of protection to help prevent having to do that in the case of something simple breaking the system.

As a side note: Since getting Windows 8 up and running properly when I built this computer, I have yet to get a BSOD after over two years and have only had major lockups requiring me to force a reset maybe three or four times.

Gemini000 wrote:

So... yeah... clean up your old restore points, everyone! You may get a surprising amount of disk space back! 😁

I believe you can specify the maximum space System Restore is allowed to use. Older restore points will get delete automatically. This way you will not have to clean them manually, and can still be confident they will not use too much space.

ZellSF wrote:

I've never had a restore point be useful, so I just turned them off entirely.

Yeah, same here. I can remember maybe one situation where it helped.

jesolo wrote:

The key this is to just make sure you back up your documents, pictures, etc. on a regular basis (this does require some discipline because, one tends to get a bit "lazy").

It's possible to set an automatic incremental backup procedure, and just forget about it. Although I still prefer the manual approach (old-fashioned I guess). Also, I never use the Users/Documents and Settings folder for storing my personal documents/pictures/videos. It feels a bad idea to store my stuff where the OS stores its stuff.

Gemini000 wrote:

I've found restore points to be extremely useful, specifically for when a driver installation fails badly. I've saved myself from complete reinstalls THREE times over the past few years thanks to them.

That's interesting. I've had failed driver installations, as all of us did, but never so bad that I would not be able to just reboot and wipe out the driver (perhaps in safe mode). What exactly happened to you in these three cases? Come to think about - if you can't even boot, how can you run system restore?

dr_st wrote:

That's interesting. I've had failed driver installations, as all of us did, but never so bad that I would not be able to just reboot and wipe out the driver (perhaps in safe mode). What exactly happened to you in these three cases? Come to think about - if you can't even boot, how can you run system restore?

If memory serves, as of Vista you can do System Restore from the Windows Recovery Mode (the thing that isn't Safe Mode but seemingly another lower level yet). I think you can even do this from boot disks. Yes, of course, your system has to boot to get to Recover Mode. People can have weird personal definitions of the word "boot". Anyhow, maybe that's what he meant.

Stiletto wrote:

dr_st wrote:

That's interesting. I've had failed driver installations, as all of us did, but never so bad that I would not be able to just reboot and wipe out the driver (perhaps in safe mode). What exactly happened to you in these three cases? Come to think about - if you can't even boot, how can you run system restore?

If memory serves, as of Vista you can do System Restore from the Windows Recovery Mode (the thing that isn't Safe Mode but seemingly another lower level yet). I think you can even do this from boot disks. Yes, of course, your system has to boot to get to Recover Mode. People can have weird personal definitions of the word "boot". Anyhow, maybe that's what he meant.

Yup. Recovery Mode is another level one step below Safe Mode which doesn't even load desktop features or explorer, just the bare minimum amount of stuff necessary to step back to a prior restore point.

One of those three instances I was able to get into safe mode but removing the offending drivers didn't solve the problem as installing them in the first place must've damaged system files in the process and I didn't have the right tools on hand to identify and fix whichever files those were from safe mode, so returning to a restore point was the simplest solution.

You can reduce the maximum size of system restore points.

I personally find hibernation to be extremely useful and worth the disk space