There are some things you may just not want eating your drive space for the Shadow Copy (previous versions) feature of Vista. Temporary files for one thing, but you might also wish to exclude entire folders and this can be done with a registry change:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot

Here you should see a few entries already. To add new ones, create more REG_MULTI_SZ values with a short, descriptive name and enter the path to which you want excluded from Shadow Copy.

Some tips:

* It is best to use environment variables (%ProgramFiles% for example) or junctions ($AllVolumes$ for example) in case things change on your system in the future (or you wish to share your recommendataions) the paths will be dynamic enough to handle changes.

* It is not necessary to include double quotes around paths, even when a space is included in the path or file name

* You may add /s to the end of a specified path to indicate that all subdirectories should also be excluded

* Wildcards (* and ? for example) are supported.