Delete All Old System Restore Points at Once
Windows provides an option to quickly delete all but recent restore points. However, this option is buried deep and you may not find it unless you know where to look. To delete all old restore points, search for “Disk Cleanup” in the Start menu and open it.
The above action will open the Disk Cleanup utility. Select “Primary (C:)” from the drop-down menu and click on the “OK” button.
Click on the “Clean up system files” button. Since the restore points are system files, you cannot see them unless you choose to clean up the system files.
This action will re-open the cleanup wizard. Select the C drive and click on the “OK” button.
You will see a new “More Options” tab in the window. Navigate to the new tab and click on the “Clean up” button under “System Restore and Shadow Copies” section.
In the confirmation window, click on the “Delete” button. As soon as you do, Windows will delete all the old restore points while keeping the recent ones.
Delete Old System Restore Points Individually
If you’d rather pick and choose which restore points to delete, you can do that too. Since Windows has no specific option to delete individual restore points, we are going to use a free and lightweight third-party tool called System Restore Explorer. Download and install it like any other software. After installing, launch it by searching for it in the Start menu. As soon as you launch it you will see all restore points. By default, the software will hide the restore points created in the last five days. If you want to see them, uncheck the “Hide restore points created in the last 5 days” checkbox.
The good thing about this software is that you can mount the restore points and see what’s in them. It’s very useful if you want to recover files or folders. To mount a restore point, select it from the list and click on the “Mount” button.
The above action will mount the restore point and open it in the File Explorer. You can explore it like any other drive or folder.
Once you are done with that, click on the “Unmount” button to unmount the mounted restore point.
To delete a restore point, simply select it from the list and click on the “Delete” button.
Click on the “Yes” button in the confirmation window and you are done.
As you can see from the below image, deleting a restore point freed up around 5Gb of space.
Alternatively, if you are using CCleaner then you don’t have to install any other software. Open CCleaner with admin rights and navigate to “Tools -> System Restore.” Here you can select and delete any individual restore points as needed. However, you will miss the “Mount” feature provided by System Restore Explorer. Do comment below sharing your thoughts and experiences about using the above methods to delete old restore points in Windows.
