How Do I Fix This?

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I keep getting a message on my computer, telling me that my recovery disk is full, and that backups can't work unless I attend to this. Any advice?

Did this problem just now start coming up, on a machine you've had for a while?

Have you been making routine backups prior to now?

Can you check your list of drives, figure out which one might be the recovery partition, and look at its free/used space?

In order to fix something, it helps to narrow down what it actually is.

Look for a "My Computer" option either in the menu or on the desktop, possibly without the "My". You should see a list of drives (or pseudo-drives) that way; right-click on one and look at its properties and you should find the free space tally.

Every once in awhile, you need to back up your data (things you've actually created with programs, rather than programs themselves) to some sort of removable media. CDs or DVDs are not a bad idea. How you do this is up to you, but your programs can be reloaded, but once your data's gone, that's hard to bring back.

Now, ask yourself whether you really need a recovery drive. If it breaks and you have to start again from a Windows install, how much will you suffer? Which bits are most important? Throw away the useless part of your recovery drive and only let it save the important bits in future.

The message appears when your machine tries to write something to its almost full recovery drive.

Without getting into difficult detail, I don't know. If it's turned off then it shouldn't trouble you any more.

Use flash drives to copy stuff that's important to you. They're cheap, and reliable - except for the problem of remembering where x is...

I've been running various PCs for a long time in home and work environments. When they give up the ghost, I use having to start out from scratch as a learning experience. From time to time I've found useful stuff on backup drives, but I've never done a formal restore.

The simplest backup is a large stack of DVDs.

There is something called Dell Data Safe, that I am not sure I want to use. It is free for a time, but then they start charging money. Has anyone else used Dell Data Safe? If so, what did you think of it?

memory on your system is actually 2 types of memory; the actual DIM SUM SIM (j/k.. memory modules, and an extra bit that your Hard drive uses to 'pretend' to be extra memory. When you've used up all your regular memory, the Operating system will 'borrow' extra memory from your hard drive. If your system suddenly acts like it's run into a brick wall, that could be the reason.

If you're down to 9 meg, the Operating system, hardware, or software may 'decide' that you're running low on memory, hence the message. Espcecially if you're down to less than 10 meg out of Gigabytes...

That's clearly not the issue here, because there's no reason to put a pagefile/swapfile on a recovery partition. If the pagefile tries to take up more space than is left on the disk, it just cancels the operation (having usable disk space is a higher priority in this scenario) and gives you a "Virtual Memory Too Low" error that doesn't directly mention disk space at all.

Just buy an external hard drive, or thumbdrive if you don't have much stuff, and keep your personal stuff like pictures movies music and what not on it. Thats the stuff that really matters when it comes to backups, not little recovery partitions. By the way, I worked in a repair shoppe, never had much luck with the built in backups. If something gets your system so messed up you need the backups, your recovery partition is screwed too. Sis had that problem, got spyware on her comp, kept redoing it with the backups, and the spyware was still there. It took a clean format to get rid of it, including the recovery. Programmers know about those backups, so they are virtually worthless. Just keep all your stuff separate and turn off the built in backup. Then you know your data is safe.

Pardon the ramble, I could use some sleep.

What you really need to back up is your data. This includes your music and videos, and the best thing to use for it is an external hard drive. They are not that expensive and hold a lot higher capacity than a stack of DVDs.