Why to delete system restore points?

Without doubt, system restore is one of the most useful features in Windows as it can roll backup Windows to the previous state if an emergency happens to the system. Powerful as it is, you still have to delete system restore points in Windows 7/8/8.1/10 sometimes.

As times go by, you may run into troubles: the disk that your backup is saved on doesn’t have enough free space, and backup failed due to lack of space. As the restore points accumulated day by day and the size of disk space is limited, your backup disk will run out of space quickly or someday. To save disk space, you need to delete old restore points.

Manually delete system restore points in Windows 7/8/10

There are two options. You can delete either all restore points or delete all but the most recent restore points.

Delete all restore points

1. Press Win + R keys to open the Run dialog. Type System Properties Protection in the Run box. The System Properties dialog will appear. Or you can right click Computer, select Properties, and then click System Protection.

2. Click the Configure button to open the following window:

3. Click the Delete button. In the next dialog, click Continue to confirm the operation. This will remove all the restore points.

Delete all but the most recent restore point

If you want to keep the most recent system restore point in Windows, do the following.

1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Click Disc Cleanup. Select the drive on which you wish to clean up all but the most recent restore point. Then switch to the “More Options” tab.

2. Click Clean up under “System Restore and Shadow Copies” tab. A message will popup – Are you sure you want to delete all but the most recent restore point? Click Delete then OK. Finally, another message will popup – Are you sure you want to perform these actions? Click Yes.

It seems that manually doing this work is troublesome. System protection is always on to protect the system, and system restore points are becoming more and more. You have to delete them from time to time. Is there a way to automatically do this work? Luckily, there is a professional backup tool which can solve this problem.

Reliable backup software that can automatically delete old backups

AOMEI Backupper Professional is powerful and reliable software designed for professional backup and restore. The deletion mechanisms can free you out of low disk space. It works as follows:

Retain a maximum number of full backup and its chained incremental or differential backups, deleting excess backups just after the next backup finishes.

Either during or after creating a backup, you can set AOMEI Backupper to automatically delete old backups to free up disk space for new backups. Let’s see how to delete restore points in Windows 7/8/8.1/10 automatically via AOMEI Backupper. Take system backup as an example:

Method 1: During the process of creating a scheduled backup task

1. Select System Backup under the Backup tab. Choose a destination path. Click Scheme in the bottom.

2. In the pop-up window, move the slider to open Enable Backup Scheme, and then you can specify the configuration in this window. After that, click Start Backup, your later old backups will be deleted automatically.

  • Options: you can set email notification, backup compression and encryption, etc.
  • Schedule: you can create incremental and differential backup based on five modes – daily, weekly, monthly, event trigger, and USB plug-in.

Method 2: After creating a backup task

All your backups created by AOMEI Backupper are listed at Backup Management under Home tab. Select a backup task, click the three-line button and select Edit Backup. In the pop-up window, click Backup Scheme option. Then open Enable Backup Scheme and specify the number of backup versions you want to retain.

Automatically deleting system restore points in Windows 7/8/8.1/10 can be easily achieved with the help of AOMEI Backupper. Also, under the protection of AOMEI Backupper, your computer will run well even when you turn off the restore points.

In addition, you can experience some more powerful features like restore system image to another computer with Universal Restore and migrate OS to SSD with System Clone. Download the free trial of AOMEI Backupper Professional to experience all the wonderful features right now!

If you want to protect unlimited computers within your company, you can pick AOMEI Backupper Technician. With the inbuilt AOMEI Image Deploy tool, you are also allowed to deploy/restore system image file on server-side computer to multiple client-side computers over network.