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VSSadmin comes with a suite of associated commands. Table I lists the commands and their function. Vista Home Premium lacks some of these. The commands may have additional switches. Note that this command should be run as an administrator.

There are several applications of VSSadmin that might be encountered by an average PC user. One would be to determine how much space is being used by volume shadow copies and another would be controlling how much space is used. Here are the commands and requisite syntax.

To find out how much space System \Restore is using, open the command prompt as administrator and enter

System Restore can use up to 15% of a hard drive for its backup files (shadow storage). As hard drives get ever bigger, that becomes a lot of space. The command "vssadmin" can be used to administer settings for System Restore. To control the space allocation, open a command prompt with administrator privileges and enter vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /Maxsize=[n] For [n] enter the desired size in MB or GB. The units must be stated: for example, "Maxsize=500MB" or "Maxsize=2GB". The example is for the C: volume but other volumes can be specified. WARNING! This will delete all your old Restore Points!

If for some reason, you wish to delete shadow copies, here are some options.

Table II explains the various switches and syntax.

Here is an example command. It deletes the oldest shadow copy on the C: volume.

In general, care should be exercised when deleting shadow copies.

If you look, you can find VSSadmin in the command line for Windows XP Professional but it isn't of any great use there.

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