System Restore, Is it really needed?

Why waste the disk space?

 

I keep the disk usage minimal, but figure SR might be useful once in a while to restore to a point before an app install or something simple like that.. I am not using an image right now, although in the past I have, and when I do, I turn SR off completely.... so right now I have no good backup and SR running....

 

Does this also apply to Vista's system restore? I ask this because I'm using system restore (uses shadow copying contra XP filter system) in Vista in case I have a boot failure something FD doesn't always fix. Vista's system restore points (free vs. paid) work with the installation disk in the event I can't boot. It's a different animal compared to XP's system restore, but I like to learn how much different. Thanks.

PW

 

For several years XP System Restore was my only fall back, short of
the Windows install CD, when manual repair efforts were unsuccessful.
I kept no statistics, but would guess it failed to recover the system
about 30 percent of the time.

Thanks to knowledge gained at Wilders, I now have functional imaging
software. To invest 5 minutes trying to recover with System Restore
just seems pointless when it only takes 20 minutes to load a
full backup image of the system partition.

But it did work most of the time, and is simple to use.
I always left it set at minimum, so there were never more
than 4 or 5 very recent restore points in inventory.

I have seen posts talking about free drive image software, but other
than Seagate DiskWizard, am not familiar with any of them. I bought
ATI 10, and for me, it has worked perfectly.

 

The other problem with imaging is that you need two internal hard drives or a large external one. I bought an external USB hard drive a couple of years ago 80GB which was the largest Seagate I could find then. It cost me $100. It's slow as heck to make an image...takes about 3 hours and one image takes up about 48% of the drive so I can't put more than one image on it. With my XP Pro SP1 machine and TI 8, I couldn't do incremental images as they were not seen. So, I used System Restore. It works, it works fast and only once did I have corruption of all 90 points and, naturally, it was a time I really needed to restore. I learned then that the corruption was from KAV rummaging around in there frequently. Since then I have excluded System Volume Information from AV scanners.

Both my previous XP computer and this one only have one hard drive so imaging was no solution until I got the external drive and it is so slow and not big enough. I have purchased a new, good sized internal hard drive and if I can successfully install it then I can put TI images on the old drive after I clone the contents of the current drive to the new one via TI 10 that comes now with SeaDisk.

I still will use System Restore though because it is so much faster for restoring. I haven't noticed it not removing software but if it doesn't, that is not hard to do. System restore is not intended to take the place of Imaging anyhow.

I always make a system restore point before installing new software so that I can restore to that point if needed. It has been a life saver several times. When I install Microsoft security patches, a restore point is automatically made before each patch is installed. That also has been a life saver. Why I would I want all the hassle with restoring an Image if I could do it a lot faster using System Restore?

 

system restore is a complete waste of resources for me, (XP ... havnt tried the vista one, i dont dare to)

whenever i had a computer problem and wanted to restore, it would mess everything up.

it would keep links/shortcuts or whatever, to missing programs, it would screw up my registry and most of the time... it didnt even work.

why bother taking such risks, get a rollback program of some kind, and leave this where it should be, forgotton!

system restore is crap

 

I have never had any luck with SR and XP (any flavour). Never returns the system to anything usable (for me). I have used Acronis Truimage ver. 8,9,10 with never a problem. But right now I'm using Windows Home Server. It does a nightly backup on 3 of my boxes automatically and I have restored a Vista system and a XP Pro system with no problems. Keeps backups as long as you want.

 

I tried System Restore one time with Vista and it worked flawlessly. But that is not to say it will work that well everytime but it did do what it was supposed to at least once I may be the oddity here but I find that everything works better in Vista.
bigc

 

So if i was to replace the system restore function with something like FD-ISR, would it work in a similar way to system restore in that you can just choose the snapshot you want to recover and it would do it? Or does it restore at every reboot?

 

I don't understand why so many folks have so many problems with System Restore and I don't. With the exception of when KAV corrupted all the restore points and another time, I get a good restore and usually to the first point I choose.

I just made a TI image and it took over two hours. Now I am verifying and that takes over one hour. I just don't get why TI is so great. Maybe I will like it better when I can store the images on this drive after I install the new drive.

 

a snapshot program, will revert all changes back to its exact-state whenever the snapshot was created.

i personally use RollbackRX Pro as snapshots dont take up massive amounts of space, unlike FD-ISR, also it has better features i feel.

or you could take the image-route and get a program like acronis home, it takes up more space than rollback, but less than fd-isr, although a restore can take up to 20 minutes, instead of just a reboot with a snapshot program.

 

With a snapshot, you cannot mount the image virtually right? Nor can you copy? I could not clone from my old XP computer to this current one because of major hardware changes. So, I just mounted the image virtually, and copied what I wanted, and kept the image for six months, and whenever I wanted something else off the old computer I just mounted the image and grabbed it.

 

I found TI to be quite buggy and slow as well. I use Ghost 2003 and it works (in my experience) much faster and more dependably than TI. I can restore my C partition from an image in around five minutes, and making an image is almost as fast, depending on how you do it. Burning it to a DVD takes a little longer, but not much. If you look around on line you may find it for a cheap price. We bought SystemWorks 2003 a couple of years ago for $7.00. I just extracted the Ghost files from the .iso and installed it without all the other junk.

 

Part, maybe most, of the slowness is due to two things (1) using a USB drive to back up to and (2) I image the entire disk and it is almost full (160GB drive), whereas, many just image Windows and not their programs and stuff that they have on different partitions. This is all one big partition. I do know folks who swear by and love Ghost.

 

System Restore is one of the first thing to remove either just before or just after turning off indexing. It really is poor even by MS standards and should be replaced with a good imaging program. To be fair to System Restore I haven't used it for years - it may have improved - but when I did use it either it reported that the first restore point wouldn't work or it restored just a basic system leaving far to much in an unstable condition.

I find that Acronis combined with Deepfreeze 6 or Returnil works well on my machines. Every reboot cleans the system and Images can be made before major changes, to test programs and to restore a perfect system if and when needed.

As to speed - it takes me 6 minutes to make an image on my slowest machine ( 45 seconds on the best) and no more than 9 minutes to restore.

 

What you have to realise is that a large portion of PC users don't know about all the other apps that have been talked about here,some(a lot)don't even know about SR or are not sure how SR works,if one of their machines"screws up" it can be useful in getting a fix underway,its not the best option but at least its there(in most cases)normally 3rd party software isn't

 

Wow! I had no idea so many thought this was such a wasted approach to eliminating short cycle problems. And there in may be some of the reason I have so little trouble.

I use System Restore mainly as a problem eliminator for something I just installed that is not acting right or is clearly conflicting with something. So there is usually a short period of time between the the two points. That would be the install point restore point and the point in time I decide to go back.

However, I have used system restore to go back two or three weeks without issue. Odd to hear all of you say it is crap. Just has not been my experience.

Johnny123, I got Ghost 2003 for PC1 and it was free with my Iomega External 40 GB drive for free....how many years ago.... . I just had to send for it and the disk came UPS in three days. Nice. Love those kind of deals.

 

That is a large image. My C partition only has around 5 GB of data. Your best bet may be the radical cure. You could copy all your data to your external drive and then partition your HDD. You can then just back up your data to your external drive using something like MS SyncToy, which is a free PowerToy that works very well. Then you would only have to image C:\. It might be a days work getting everything reinstalled, but it would save a lot of time in the future.

Another thing, if you compress your data files with WinRAR before you copy them to your external drive, when you unpack them again it will get rid of the ADSs. WinRAR doesn't save the streams unless you tell it to on the advanced tab when you make a default compression profile. If you did that and reinstalled Windows you'd be able to get rid of all the ADSs.

 

I guess that this behaviour is explained by a different USB>IDE chipset.

 

Yes, in the drive. Perhaps the newer WD drive has a slower chipset.

 

I have heard some people say SR takes 20-30 mins to restore! I have used SR 15-20 times (set prior to installs) and I have found that it usually adds 1-2 mins to reboot, never more than 5 mins. When using SR thru start>all programs>accessories>system tools....I have problems. When r-click>my computer, l-click>properties, turn on/off SR, I've had no issues with restoring, and it also doesn't set daily-restore points-only new points on new installs. So for me SR works gr-r-r-reat for me.

 

My results with System restore are similiar, usually about 5/10 minutes to complete a sys restore in Vista.