Tip to regain storage space on a Surface

[theefman]

Came across this on Neowin, could be a solution for those who are running out of space for apps on the default storage.

Andy Rathbone's Books ? Making a Recovery Drive for the Microsoft Surface RT

 

[Pete]

Also regular visits to Disc Cleanup (especially after updates) will help too.

 

[Pete]

The linked article above doesn't make it clear how creating a recovery partition will recover storage space. Care to explain further?

 

[inteller]

well cause you are going to move the recovery stuff to a USB stick. Then you are going to delete the 3Gb recovery partition. If your Surface goes boom then you put in the stick and press some button combination and it will read from that instead of the (now deleted) recovery partition.

Of course if you lose the USB stick and the surface dies you are super SOL.

 

[ZombieBacchus]

Thanks for the link. I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier. Pretty slick move. Thanks!

 

[stephen_az]

Of course if you follow the directions and then choose to delete the recovery partition, you will be out of luck if you have to reset the system and don't have the thumb drive in your pocket (or you misplace it). People might also want to check with Microsoft regarding whether removing the recovery partition voids your warranty. It would be more than a bit awkward if you remove the partition and then either lose or damage the thumb drive only to have Microsoft tell you a) you voided your warranty, or b) you need to send it to them so that they can reimage the device for a fee. To each their own but I just don't see how this makes much sense for 3GB or 4GB of space. Even if you don't want to go the route of a MicroSDXC card and just want to make up the difference of a few GB on a 32GB Surface RT, inserting an 8GB MicroSD card will cost under $10.00....

 

[inteller]

3Gb is cheap insurance to be able to restore your Surface to factory condition at any time.

PLUS, what if Microsoft starts providing updates that pare down the size of the OS and update the Recovery Partition? SO that if one restored from recovery the system partition would have more space? You'd be SOL since you blew it away.

 

[theefman]

There are valid points to not deleting the partition but after installing a few games and apps within 6 months or less you could possibly be hitting the limit for storage. The extra space could come in handy then. Anyway, its just a suggestion.

 

[Jazmac]

Thanks for the tips.

 

[Jips]

One thing I have done is right clicked 'My Documents','My Pictures','My Videos' and 'Downloads' and click 'location' tab and then moved them to my microsd card

Then anything I download etc goes to the card and not the base memory. Done something similar on my main pc with the SkyDrive folder so it is always backed up and available.