I just deleted my restore points, and created a new one. The usage is now 19.92 MB. Now I'm wondering if I mis-read the usage when I said it was over 7 GB (though that would explain my missing restore points problem). This is one of those moments that I wish I could go back in time 5 minutes.
Based on the constant growth of the Current Usage figure in the configure window, I'm certain that I was right the first time, it was over 7 GB, not MB. I was shut down over night, which stopped it for a while, but it's picked up this morning, and is showing 2.89 GB. I posted yesterday that it was around 19 MB after creating my 2nd restore point, and over 200 MB a while later.
As of this morning, I still have the 3 restore points I put in yesterday. I had a Windows update, but no update related restore points. On that topic, I read a post from someone who had contacted M/S, and was told that they only create a pre-update restore point for critical updates.
znod - those calculations definitively don't make sense.
lumbco - After reading many posts about users that have a scheduled task to run the automatic restore points daily, but don't see any results, I came up with a theory. In Windows 7, and I presume Windows 8, an automatic restore point is created only if a restore point has not been created in the past 7 days. The task scheduler can be set to run the program that creates a restore point every hour, but one of the first things it's coded to do, is check to see when the last restore point was created. If it was within 7 days, a new restore point is not created, but the program has done it's job, and ends successfully. The successful execution message you see, doesn't mean a restore point was created, it just means the program ran. That's my theory anyway.
I'd still be interested from any of you, if you see your Current Usage in the configure window growing each time you go into the configure window. Especially if it hasn't already reached the Max Usage setting, or you've started over by deleting your existing restore points (you might as well, if they are disappearing anyway).
I'm going to go back to the store today, and look at the figures a display computer.