You may have already seen that Microsoft have released there first beta of Windows Vista SP2, as it was reported on several sites yesterday, one of my favorities is Rafael’s Within Windows blog. So you’ve probably already heard that there’s nothing much in there and it’s just a collection of previous fixes, albeit about a 290MB collection. Well standback and prepare to be flabagasted, because on x64 Vista Ultimate, that colection grows to about 490MB, it must be all those 64bit pointers đŸ™‚
I’ve done a little more work on my System Restore point explorer, and it now actually allows you to explore đŸ™‚
I’ve made use of the excellent AlphaVSS library which exposes the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) API’s as native .net objects. I’ve been having a few issues accessing these in Vista x64, but I have tested this in Vista x86 and it appears to be working ok. Again feedback is welcome via comments.
A couple of days ago my C: drive ran out of disk space and I was a little confused, because only a few days earlier I had around 30GB free, so I decided to do some digging and figure out where it had all gone…
Anyway to my surprise it had been consumed by Vista’s System Restore feature, I had installed a couple of applications, decided they weren’t for me and un-installed them. Each of these actions had created a new system restore point. After figuring out how to get access to the “C:System Volume Information” folder (I don’t really recommend you do this) I saw that some of these system restore points were up to 3GB each in size, but I couldn’t find any way to delete them.
I googled a little and some people seemed to suggest that the Disk Cleanup Wizard would remove them, but it didn’t work for me, in fact the only way I reclaimed over 40GB of disk space was to disable (which does remove the data) and then re-enable system restore.
But what I really wanted was a way to delete individual restore points and I couldn’t find anything already out there, so I set about developing a solution myself.
The more I researched the more advanced I thougt I could make this tool, so currently it does what I first wanted, allows you to delete individual restore points. But I plan to add functionality that will allow you to mount a restore point and browse it’s contents (hence it’s name System Restore Explorer)
It’s not really ready for public consumption yet, but I am planning to upload a beta copy here tomorrow, and hopefully I can get some feedback
Update
Well, as promised here is a beta for people to play with, use this at your own risk, if it happens to trash your entire computer it’s not my fault! This program requires .net framework 3.5 and has been tested on Vista only.