Turning off volume shadow copy

Short intro

Shadow Copy Volume or Snapshot Service or VSS, is a feature firstly embedded with Windows Server 2003 and latter in all releases of Microsoft Windows, that allows taking manual or automatic backup copies or snapshots of a file or folder on a specific volume. Shadow Copy technology requires the file system to be NTFS.

How to disable?

• Start > then type: services.msc in the search bar then confirm
• Double click on the service: Volume shadow copy
• Change the startup type to Manual
• Then click on Stop

On the Recovery tab:

• The three first options : First, Second and Subsequent Failures must be set on “Take No Action”.
• To confirm press OK

How to edit the disk space allocated to shadow?

If you do not want to disable shadow copies and you want to customize the maximum disk space allocated to this service, you can use this:

• Start Menu> All Programs> Accessories
• Right-click Command Prompt> Run as administrator
• Type the following command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage/On = C: / For = C: / maxsize = 3GB 

The / On = C: indicates that the photos will be saved on the C
The / For = C: indicates that the photographs are those of the C
The / 3GB maxsize =: indicates the size to allow instant snapshots, in our case it is 3 GB MB can be used to express size in MB
Confirm by pressing OK.

Disable the "Previous versions"

Now that the service is disabled, the "Previous Versions" is useless.



So to lighten the menu and properties of elements, it is best to remove it. For this, proceed as follows:
A registry backup is strongly recommended
Open the Registry Editor
Locate the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\ 

Create a new key with the name PreviousVersions (Edit menu> New> Key)
Create a new DWORD (32bits), under the latter key, with the name DisableLocalPage (Edit menu> New> DWORD (32 bit)).
Please double click this value and put 1 in the data fields.