Windows 10: Think I Messed Up Bad - Deleted A Key in RegEdit I Shouldn't Have.

I am a bit confused. You started your first post with this:

For me at least, telling you are a geek indicates that you consider yourself having above average knowledge about computing. For instance, I often present myself as a geek meaning precisely that, that I know more than an average user. Although I am quite vain, that's not vanity as much as a simple provable fact.

Josey's reply contains the single most important piece of advice in this thread: a Macrium system image backup had got you back in business in a few minutes, maybe half an hour depending on the size of the image backup. The same with any other imaging application, Macrium is just one of many.

A geek would know that Macrium and all other imaging programs can be booted from their own rescue media, which then allows you to restore a system image. A geek would have known how to install an imaging application and use it to create rescue media for emergency situations like yours now, and how to create a system image.

Please do not read the above wrong, I am not criticizing you but just expressing my confusion. In any case, when you have clean installed and got Windows up and running again, do not forget to install an imaging application, create its rescue media and create regular system images.

My choice and what I recommend is Macrium Reflect, see the tutorial: Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect Windows 10 Backup Restore Tutorials

 

When you take off your tin foil hat maybe you should listen to people that are trying to help you. If you think this maybe you should use Some Linux Distro or simply read the newspaper. What Kari said goes double for me.*Wink

 

I fail to see how it's relevant to my current situation though. It wouldn't be able to help me now, it'd be able to help prevent future issues by making backups. But it's not like I don't know that everyone's supposed to keep backups - I just don't because I don't have the storage space nor the money to buy more of it. Further I format my whole drive and start over every few months anyway because I am, as the next guy put it, "a tinfoil hat".

I don't know much about the company Macrium because I haven't done a lot of research on what a good backup software is because I know that I currently don't have the storage space for it. Further, I'd only want to keep an encrypted backup on an external drive as I'd fear any local backups being stolen (plus it should be seperate anyway, for data safety reasons too) and I don't have the hardware for that yet.

I understand that everyone should make backups. It's basic IT 101 stuff - always keep a backup. Unfortunately I have neither a job nor any money so I don't have the hardware to keep backups right now. All I have is a 16GB flash drive and a 256GB SSD, and I reformat it every few months anyhow. I just need to keep a backup of my user directories (documents etc) anyway, which is as easy as just copying them over to my flash drive. I don't need to save the programs because, to be blunt, they're all pirated anyway so I'll just reacquire and reinstall them all at no cost to me. The only thing that's REALLY important on my whole system is my KeePass database, and I keep many backups of it and several old tiny-capacity USBs I found lying around. Everything else can be deleted and replaced with no problems for me.

I'll start looking into the topic of "good backup software" once that becomes something I have the hardware for. Which may be soon. Again though, bluntly put, probably the reason I never feel terribly inclined to backup is because no actual money of mine has gone into the software on the machine anyway.

 

A 256 GB external HDD can be found with less than $30 (example). In your case that would be enough to keep and least one full backup.

 

I can understand that you can't afford a drive to make backups on. What I don't understand is why you didn't make a backup of the Registry before you decided to start deleting things in the it. A Registry backup wouldn't have taken a lot of space.

 

I'll look into it all again sometime soon. If I'm gonna get backup drives I may as well get some storage with it too. Would like a place to store all my setup files and videos which can easily take hundreds of GB. Right now I have to keep anything I'm not immediately using deleted.

I do changes to the registry fairly often for various uses, and saving every time gets irritating I guess. I'm annoyed pretty easily by anything repetitive I guess. I hadn't had a problem doing it in years until now.