To Disable or not to Disable System Restore

Agree with Sully.

Personally, the first thing I do after a clean install is create another administrator account, boot into that, and disable the built in one (XP Pro).

... then I disable the 30 useless services, in addition to a ton of other things.

 

i always disable System Restore and rely on imaging to get back in business.
on Windows 7, i found that using System Restore was only successful about 4 out or 5 times.

which is as good as useless, imo.

 

Unless a decent backup system restore is in place, leave it enabled.

 

I would not call 4 out of 5 useless.

 

I couldn't agree more.

 

Disabling System Restore is not good overall PC governance.

Depending on the amount of disc space you have allotted to system restore, it does not continually eat disc space as it runs on a First-in-first-out or FIFO protocol. So, SR doesn't pile huge amounts of meaningless information on your main drive. You may reduce the size SR takes of your main drive by adjusting the size of SR points that are stored.

Under Windows 7, an SR point is automatically created every Patch Tuesday, or, every second Tuesday of every month. Or, when you undertake a Windows Update action against your PC.

Even with known-good disk imaging in place, it is good practice to leave System Restore alone.

 

if i can't rely on it (System Restore) 100% of the times then i can't rely on it.

 

Well as in the song says by meatloaf, Two out of Three Ain't Bad. In this case Four out of Five Ain't either.

 

Imaging is a thousand out of a thousand. I'm not a System Restore user but I tell my friends who don't image to leave System Restore turned on.

 

I have retained system Restore. It's a quick fix. I've got Snapshot but I hesitate to use it as destroys the current C-Drive. Good night to any recent docs & favs etc. And its slow. Slow to back up & slow to restore. I consider it as a "fully featured" reformatting of the drive.

Which of these imaging systems do you guys use that is quick & non-destructive to existing data like System Restore?

 

Yes, sometimes it is, IF it works.... I guess it might be best to leave it enabled if there's no other backup/imaging system in place, but at best, it's probably just a shot in the dark in most situations. But still, perhaps better than nothing, yes.

 

I'm not sure, as I don't do this myself, but I would think that if you used Windows built-in Backup system to back up your files and make a system image regularly, then in case of disaster, you could restore the image first, then run Backup to restore the most recent data files. I'm assuming that's how it might work anyway....

 

i disabled the windows system restore
and installed the Paragon backup and restore free (way back in 2010) and create my system images on it and then uninstall the product.
of the 8 times i have had to restore my PC, it did the job beautifully.

 

I have never looked in-depth at system restore, so I cannot say what it does or does not do exactly.

However, real world experience shows me that it is capable of restoring registry/system/program files to an early point effectively. Malware and virii aren't exactly what I have used it for in the past, more like for getting rid of a problematic program or an update (ie. drivers). It removes those very well. In fact, out of the hundreds of times I have likely used it, it usually worked well.

I think there is some criteria to be defined as to what a user EXPECTS system restore to do. I expect it to leave user profile alone, but restore some basic system/application settings. Others might be expecting it to do more than it was designed to?

IMO it works well for what I think its intended purpose is.

Sul.

 

System restore's good for simple fixes when you just want to get past the issue and get on with life. Should you disable it? That depends. System restore's rarely necessary but it's a good safety net for novices. I have it disabled and haven't needed it for a long time.

 

I've had images I made with Acronis and Paragon which failed to restore due to an error in the backup. Because of the supposed error in the backup the entire backup was rendered completely useless. The external hard drive the images were stored on was error free, and other files on the drive opened without problems.

Sure, System Restore does not work 100% of the time. But in reality it is very rare indeed for it not to work. Unless there are significant problems with Windows it will work very close to 100% of the time.

 

System restore is very handy in the following situation: a driver installation failed, windows update failed reverting to an earlier restore point is very easy. When you are using system image software, you need to restore the full back-up in combination with the differential or incremental back up's to be able to be up and running with the risk that some documents aren't imaged in the meantime, which isn't the case of Windows system restore.

With system restore you only need to load a restore point and reboot, which only takes +/- 15 minutes and a reboot, without the risk of not back-upped documents.

Also there is only a small amount of users that creates full image everyday, and have their image software take snapshots on certain time intervals (which can have an impact on the system performance). So that you not have to restore a full image.

I agree a bad driver you can easily revert by removing it through device manager.

I recommend to have System Restore and Image software installed.

Also since the launch of Windows startup repair which was first introduced in Windows Vista, relies also on System Restore.

 

If a driver fails, Windows will reverse it even without System restore, because it uses a feature called Last Known Good Configuration, that is much more usefull. I tried to get help from System Restore several times since XP till 8 and it never worked properly and even if it did, there were some problems afterwards, so I had to reinstall anyway. The way it radically slows down setups and changes, it is much faster to do a clean install once in a while if needed, then to suffer consequences of it being enabled.

Who would be so crazy to actually store documents in the documents folder or any Windows folder for that matter instead of a normal folder on the other partition as well?

 

I have read the thread with much pleasure. Thank you all.

As for me the best strategy in imaging of the system partition is:

1. Create 2 separate partitions: system partition and partition for your data.
2. Don't store your important files in your system partition - in user libraries ("Documents", "Musics" etc folders). Or just transfer your user account out of the system partition (but I had issues with this).
3. Disable Windows inbuilt restore. This thing regular disappoints me.
4. Make imaging of the system partition starting from the fresh install. Then make images after every important change in system which is difficult to repeat again.
5. It is a good habit to verify your images when you create them and periodically do it later.
6. It is a good idea to combine only 2 types of imaging: differential (this is quicker) and full (this is safer)). Though if you do them often then you can use incremental images for less important points.
7. Store these images on the comp (not in the system partition, the "capsule" is a good choice btw) and on an external disk.

 

Many have voiced a similar frustration inc. me. However, there are ample times it does deliver too. My education about retaining System Restore came about when I had done a simple stupid thing that was within the scope of System Restore to fix, but alas, it was not activated. And so I had to "limp twenty seven days back to base" to get the last good image.

And I still haven't learned my lesson about more regular image back-ups. Thank God for System Restore's regular auto snapshots. Even if I get around to bi-weekly images, the "in the pits" time is uncomfortably long & slow, until your back on the road.