Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic use a feature called Shadow Storage to keep track of every file that changes, by keeping the older version.

However, Microsoft has removed the "Restore Previous Versions" feature from these two versions of Vista.

The result is that Vista still fills up the Shadow Storage, but you cannot do anything with it.

A side effect is that Shadow Storage occupies much of the disk space reserved for restore points, so the space fills up after just a few restore points, perhaps five, and older restore points are automatically deleted to make room.

A workaround may be Shadow Explorer. If you have tried the program, please report here.

That said, you can alter the allotted space (default: 15% of the total hard disk size) in all versions of Windows Vista by running the command line program: vssadmin

Another possible cause for seeing only few restore points is that you may not have the showing of restore points older than 5 days enabled. To enable it, choose a different restore point, click on [Next], then check the box to show points older than 5 days.