The weekend has arrived and usually this mean I have clean up the mess I made during the week. Today I planned to clean up my SAN a bit because it was getting low on disk space (hey, it's only 300Gb right?).

So after I deleted most of the Microsoft MSDN .ISO files from all beta versions of Visual Studio, Vista, Home Server, Media Center SDK, it still didn't cut a hole in the drive. Next up were those pesky temp folders:

• c:\windows\temp\
• c:\temp\
• c:\documents and settings\<user>\appdata\local\Temp\
• c:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\***\Temporary ASP.net Files\
• and many more

I could've used the Disc Cleanup Wizard but I was being thorough. Not thorough enough as it seemed. Still no reason why there was a whopping 40Gb space unaccounted for. Tools. I need tools. I found out this nice program called WinDirStat, which scans through your harddrive and shows where all your Gb's have gone. It showed me the 40Gb area within a couple of minutes.

The huge amount of space was taken up by the Restore Points, generated by Vista automatically. There seems to be a basic setting that takes about 15% of your drive's space for automatic restore points. But which the size of my drive I found that way too much.

There actually is a way to set the size of the Restore Point storage, and you can do that by running a commandline tool named vssadmin.exe from the commandline. You'll need to run the commandline as administrator because it is required. Note that Visual SourceSafe also has a vssadmin.exe, so you may need to specify the correct path (It's %windir%\system32\vssadmin.exe if you want to know). Just start it without any arguments and you'll get a bit of help. I hate to type tutorials but fortunately Microsoft was nice enough to explain it for me on TechNet. Instead of a percentage you can specify the maximum space that the association may occupy on the shadow copy storage volume.

Happy Cleaning!