liggyman's blog

If you do incremental or diff based backups, or if you compress your Windows Virtual Machine you will find that this tip will save you plenty of time, bandwidth, and disk space.

The Windows page file changes constantly and is large. It’s up to 4GB on some of my Virtualized workstations. It also doesn’t compress well and is really not needed in your backups.

By filling the pagefile with zeros when shutting the VM down to do a backup, that part of the image will be unchanged between increments/diffs. It will also compress down to almost nothing.

To achieve this we need to set one registry key to do this you can import the following from a .reg file or make the appropriate changes manually.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
“ClearPageFileAtShutdown”=dword:00000001