System Volume Information folder question

[miha2]

Recently, I have been defragmenting my hard drive, and have a few questions about System Volume Information folder of the hard drive:
1. There are enormously large files in that folder, with some of them being 1 GB, some more than 10 GB. Why?
2. What are those files?
3. Do I really need them? To be that large?
4. Is it like winsxs folder, having hard links to files?
5. Is there any way to remove/reduce it?
6. What else should I know about the folder?

 

[kenrivers]

A lot of the space could be used by System Restore Points. You can delete older restore points and free us some space.
"Go to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > System > System Protection (in the left pane) > System Protection Tab > Configure allows you to delete restore points, change the settings and change the disk space allocation."
Source: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/92775152-7330-4da4-8af9-10a04e0bc783/clean-out-system-volume-information-folder

 

[miha2]

True. There were 24 GB of system restore. Yet, another question: is there any (easy) way to view the contents of the System Volume Information folder and how much the files weight?

 

[kenrivers]

Will look into it and get back to you.