The System Restore Utility May Be Suspended on a System Drive Even Though There Is Enough Disk Space

When you examine the settings for the System Restore utility, you may observe that System Restore is suspended even though you have enough free disk space on the system drive. If you attempt to start System Restore, you may receive the following message:

This behavior can occur when the following conditions are true:

• A drive that is not a system drive that has System Restore enabled on it has reached less than 50 MB of free disk space.
• A copy, delete, modify operation was made to a file that is monitored by System Restore on such drive.

This will cause System Restore to suspend across the system.

To work around this behavior, use either of the following two methods:

Method 1

If the drive that is running low on disk space does not need to be monitored, disable System Restore on that drive:

1. On the System Properties dialog box, click the System Restore tab.
2. Under Drive Settings, click Available drives to select the appropriate drive.
3. Click Settings.
4. Click to select the Turn off System Restore on this drive check box.
5. Click OK, and then click OK on the System Properties dialog box.

Method 2

Start the Disk Cleanup tool and free up to 200 MB of space on the drive that has caused the problem. You can also free that space by deleting unnecessary files, folders, or programs from the drive.

If you have freed at least 200 MB of disk space, the status of System Restore may be displayed as "Suspended" on the System Restore user interface. This behavior is by design as System Restore, by default, waits for 15 minutes after you have freed the disk space before System Restore restarts. After you have freed up the disk space, you can start System Restore to immediately restore its monitoring function on your computer if you click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, click System Tools, and then click System Restore.