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Turn Off Shadow Copies to Speed Up Vista
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 12:00 AM on December 5, 2007
Tech magazine PC Advisor rounds up 30 fairly standard "quick fixes" to fine-tune Windows XP and Vista systems, but one tip in particular caught my eye. Noting that all versions of Vista make "Previous Versions" or "Shadow Copies" of files when they change, but only the Enterprise, Business and Ultimate flavors can actually restore from them, the feature recommends moving your documents and personal files on a separate partition or drive and turning off "System Protection" on that portion. It might seem a bit excessive to save a few CPU cycles, but as the site points out, separating documents and programs also makes essential backups much easier to pull off.
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
Leafy
Posted 1:36 PM 4/12/07
I agree bout that - turning off system restore aint such a good thing. I've had three cases of bad installations almost killing my PC, but system restore saved me.
Reinstalling on every bad system breakdown is bad news for me - I need to reinstall, re-tweak and re-update my machine. Just the last two take me quite a while...
Although the amount of space it eats cant be ignored
Leafy
Adam Chernow
Posted 12:44 PM 4/12/07
@genderbunny: I don't have a choice BUT to do that as I have a laptop. No room for a 2nd drive. HOWEVER with that said, I have my data backed up on an external drive AND on a Amazon S3 "drive". In fact, the latter is an AUTOMATIC back-up for me.
-A
Adam Chernow
The How-To Geek
Posted 9:33 AM 4/12/07
@genderbunny: Just trying to be responsible and warn people =)
It's also worth noting that System Restore is not enabled by default on your secondary (data) drive anyway... so this setting really shouldn't be changed by anybody unless you are specifically looking to disable System Restore.
The How-To Geek
genderbunny
Posted 9:24 AM 4/12/07
@The How-To Geek: It's not really a good idea to put data on your system partition in the first place, for the reason listed above. Keeping it on a different drive entirely also protects your data somewhat when Windows goes down, and makes it incredibly simple to to a fresh install every now and again to keep Windows from accumulating too much slog.
On the subject of System Restore, if you're the kind of person who breaks your computer a lot, I think having to reinstall Windows a few times will make you into the type of person who doesn't.
genderbunny
wwahammy
Posted 8:25 AM 4/12/07
I would strongly recommend against doing this. Shadow copies not only are used for traditional System Restore but they're also used for some installation programs, especially ones from Windows Update. In the event of an update gone wrong, you are going to have no way to go back a working system. Additionally, Vista's built-in backup program (and probably a lot of custom ones too) uses shadow copies so if you turn off shadow copies you won't be able to backup you computer.
Don't turn off shadow copies unless you REALLY know what you're doing. In fact if you haven't turned off shadow copies already, that means you probably shouldn't do so.
wwahammy
The How-To Geek
Posted 8:11 AM 4/12/07
I wouldn't recommend performing this change on your system drive, because you won't be able to use System Restore, which is a fairly essential feature, especially if you are the type of person that breaks your computer a lot.
The only thing this really saves you is some disk space.
The How-To Geek