Windows 10: 0x80070026 System Restore error regarding "AppxStaging"

Can somebody fix or at least shine some light on this very common problem?


I was forced to do a clean install of Windows 10 three weeks ago because every attempt to fix this problem failed, System Restore would suddenly decide that it would no longer work and that it would end with an error each time telling me that it couldn't finish because %ProgramFiles%\WindowsApps could not write to the destination "AppxStaging". This is not an uncommon problem! It is everywhere online if you Google it.


Three weeks ago I bit the bullet and did a completely clean install deleted all partitions and let Windows 10 Installation media create them all anew, I did this because I had spent the better part of two years fighting against a system that had no restore capacity, each time it had a BCD or bootloader issue I would spend several hours fixing it when I really wished I could simply utilise a system restore.


So I reinstalled, a virgin install, a clean install, Windows 10 20H2 media, everything running smoothly until a freeze-up while trying to hibernate left me with a BCD problem I couldn't get back from, likely damaged the registry. I didn't worry, I thought "at least System Restore will work now", but it's doing the same sh*t it did before!


How can this not be fixed? It's not an uncommon problem! System Restore in Windows 10 has a serious issue when it comes to the Program Files\WindowsApps folder that causes it to fail.


There are topics about this problem going back 5 years!


Error: 0x80070026


System Restore could not continue because of an error


Source: %ProgramFiles%\WindowsApps

Destination: AppxStaging


This is clearly a problem with System Restore because my windows installation only had about 15 programs installed, two of which were game clients and the other likely 13 games!


I've tried every solution on the internet, the most common one being to take ownership of the "WindowsApps" folder from TrustedInstaller and to delete/rename it, but even when I have done that System Restore still won't complete successfully, which makes me believe the problem is not with the read/write capabilities of the folder but the storage of the restore itself! A problem with the mechanism!




I could go off on a tangent and complain about how every 15th or 20th time I try to hibernate or shut down the PC it decides to hang - forcing me to "kill the power" - but this would not be such an issue if the 1-in-50 times it damaged the registry I could perform a system restore to repair it.


For the first time in my life I am wishing I had familiarised myself with Linux.

:)

 

System Restore fails: AppxStaging %ProgramFiles%\WindowsApp 0x80070091

AFAIK, first detailed on 15th Feb here in post #4...
]System Restore fails: AppxStaging %ProgramFiles%\WindowsApp 0x80070091

 

System Recovery Error and AppxStaging folder:

By performing a system configuration restore, I got the error 0x80070005 which translating from my language says more or not:

Error while restoring the directory from the recovery point.

Origin: AppxStaging

Destination: %ProgramFile%\WindowsApps

The problem is not so much the failure of the restoration, because I manually resolved the problem I had, but the fact that the recovery error has subtracted about 10 GB of free space, and subsequent attempts to recover them with integrated tools (automatic
maintenance and disk cleanup) didn't work.

So after deleting all recovery points and restarting the PC, checking the folder "System volume information" with the tool SpaceSniffer, I saw that there is the AppxStaging folder that occupies 19.5GB.

So I went to examine another 2 PCs I have at home, one with win8 and the other with win10, and neither of them has the AppxStaging folder in "C:\System Volume Information\SystemRestore".

So it's correct to think that the 10GB lost as a result of the error are used by this folder, which due to the error has not been deleted? Whereas it's not the first time I've got this error.

In this case I would try to delete it, hoping to be able to do it with ShapeSniffer, and then try to create a new restore point, and perform a recovery later, to see if deleting the folder also solves the problem, but I would first be sure that the 10GB lost
are actually those used by the AppxStaging folder, to avoid losing further space, without then knowing how to get it back.

Sorry for my English

 

System Restore fails: AppxStaging %ProgramFiles%\WindowsApp 0x80070091

It was possibly the error about the Restore Point being damaged or deleted. It is still the Appxstaging issue but with the Source and Destination reversed which is easily missed. The error pop up Window looks very similar but without the number 0x80070091 error code. I did encounter this problem as well during testing and did what you did, ie; Restore from an image.

So far as I've seen there is no suggested fix for this one yet, but it is the reverse end of the same problem. What I did notice when this happened to me was that System Restore went reading from an External Hard disk for some reason.