Not that many years ago, a msft vice president said on television: "We will break your hardware..." Who remembers ?
MS should have its own. Why should I have to create a restore point manually prior to every test. And on a test machine why doesn't the restore storage folder "Grow" with the amount of tests. Hmmm.....I need to think about this one for awhile.
No need to think. You need to install the hard link shell extension to understand what the files you'are seeing really are. In short all the files are in winsxs directory and then are hardlinked to windows/programs. If you delete say the whole \system32 directory you gain almost no space because all files are still there, just the links were removed. And obviously that linux like feature is used also for the restore points. In short only users files and the external programs takes space there