Windows 10: System restore points

Restore points being deleted.

Older restore points are being auto-deleted. And I'd like to keep them.

I saved some restore points in October, but now they're gone, and the only ones left, are the ones I created in November.

I've allowed 90 Gb of memory space for restore points, and the total size of the five November points is 16 Gb.

At this point, I'd like to save them all. At least 6 months of them.

Help!

:)

 

System Restore Points: No check points created.

Does windows 10 make restore points on it's own. Have had windows 10 installed for a few days and when I checked for restore points, there were none. I make my own at this time. Sorry it did make one when I installed Classic View. I installed windows updates
today, no restore points were made before they were installed.

So what settings are we missing to get system or other restore points in windows 10., are is this another problem Microsoft forgot to fix.

Original title: System Restore Points.

 

System Restore Points: No check points created.

Hi,

Thank you for posting on Microsoft Community. I understand the inconvenience you are facing. I will certainly help you with this.

If you’re not seeing any restore points, it might be because system protection isn’t turned on. To check:

• Press Windows key + X and click on Control Panel
  ,
• Search for Recovery, and then select Recovery.
• Click on Configure System Restore.
• Check if Configure and make sure Turn on system protection is selected.

To configure Restore point manually kindly refer to the below given link and check if it helps:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/create-a-system-restore-point



Hope this information helps. Post back with updated issue details for further help.

Thank you.

 

It seems some Windows updates delete restore points. Experience was noted to vary from user to user when this was briefly discussed here months ago. Dual booting and major upgrades cause restore point loss.

And experience tells us not to rely on system restore entirely. Sometimes trying to use a restore point fails for unaccountable reasons.

Disk imaging is strongly recommended- far more comprehensive and useful and a wider variety of circumstances. E.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + its boot medium + external storage. Using that you can quite readily achieve backups over an extended period - which protect you in the event of disk failure, unbootable PC, ransomware.... a much broader range of risks.

A few others like e.g. Rollback RX or similar.

 

Personally, I find using Restore Points a waste of time. They should properly be called Operating System Restore Points -- because that is all they do, restore the OS and some supporting files.

When you create a Restore Point, all the OS does is save off the Registry and the system files that are being updated -- not your apps, nor your data or settings.

Thus, when you do a Restore, all that happens is that the Registry gets overwritten, and the system files get overwritten -- from the stuff that was saved.

So, it's not like a time machine, where you can restore your PC to a state is was some time ago.

Like others, I quit using it a long time ago and prefer doing Imaging with Macrium Reflect.

 

I use both. I have had system restore save me several times. I like it for when you install a piece of software you are suspect of. I make a system restore point just before I install it. It isn't the solution to everything though. I also image using Macrium several times a week.

 

I have found System Restore to be useful. But it is not a time machine that restores the computer to the exact state it was before. Compromises made in interest of keeping restore points to a small size preclude that. Whenever i have used system restore it has always been a very recent restore point. I would be very reluctant to use a restore point more then a couple of weeks old. The further back you go the more likely the restore will fail or leave the system in a worse state it was before. I would expect a restore point 6 months old to fail. Microsoft knows this and that is one of the reasons why older restore points are deleted.

If you want to go back a month or more you need to make image backups. They were designed for this. Restore points were not.

 

I , like others here, use both. System restore is relatively fast and usually reliable ........ up to a point. Nothing beats a full imaging for when a catastrophe happens but I've found System restore works fine for the minor issues.

If you want to save older restore points you can just delete a few of the newer ones. I use Ccleaners ability for this when I have more than I need or think I'll use. MOST of the time this is adequate for my needs. You can also just go into System restore itself and delete the "middle" ones.

 

I too have found little value in Restore Points and abandoned them long ago. What I have found to be extremely useful is to run 3 low-capacity (500 GB) hard drives simultaneously . One drive (H) has just 1 partition and is used for weekly Image backups.

The other two drives are each divided into 2 partitions for a total of 4 partitions consisting of drives C, D, E, and F. Then the OS on drive C is kept segregated from everything else while all Files are kept exclusively on drive F. The two remaining partitions D and E are used for Clone copies (CBAK and FBAK) where C is cloned to D and F is cloned to E.





Note that the way Windows assigns drive letters, Drives C and E are on Disk 0 while Drives D and F are on Disk 1. This allows C to be cloned to D and F cloned to E. The object is to be able to enter the BIOS and boot to either Drive C or D if one of the Drives Fail. That way no matter which drive is the boot drive, there is access to both the OS and Files.

The software I use for Cloning partitions and making image files saved to Drive H is an older utility called EaseUs Workstation 2 run at the DOS level off a CD disk. It no longer works under windows 10 but does continue to work flawlessly using the "Emergency Boot Disk" placed in the DVD tray during Boot-up. It contains all the necessary files to boot to DOS and run Workstation 2 to make and restore images and clones.

This backup scheme has saved me many times from having to re-install Windows going way back to the XP days.

 

I use both system restore and system image. System restore is very useful if you encounter system problems that restoring to a previous version can correct. As others have said, it is a restore of system files whereas a system image is an image of the entire C drive.

If you want to keep additional system restore points, use the configure feature to increase the allowable space for them.

System Image may be accessed by clicking on the link at the bottom of File History. I keep 3 generations. You have to do some renaming if you want to do this because system restore only writes the file "WindowsImageBackup". This file is over written each time you do a system image backup. I add a 2 and 3 to the file name before doing the backup.