No restore point for you

Once upon a time I sat down to write a blog posting. While waiting for Windows XP to boot up, the System Restore icon on the desktop caught my eye.

I suggested making a desktop icon for System Restore back in July when I offered Four tips to using System Restore on Windows XP. In this case, the icon served as a visual reminder that I hadn't checked up on System Restore in a while.

System Restore is a feature of Windows XP* that periodically backs up the registry and other system files that Microsoft considers critical. Each backup is called a Restore Point. Whenever something goes wrong, with either Windows or an application, restoring the system to a Restore Point when everything was working well, should probably be your knee-jerk debugging reaction.

The problem with System Restore is that it's a miserably designed application, one that could only be produced by a company with no competition in the marketplace. You need to periodically check up on it because it both breaks and turns itself off and in neither case does Windows XP tell you that anything is wrong (you can't make this stuff up).

So, while XP was in the final stages of booting, I clicked on the System Restore icon and then chose to "Restore my computer to an earlier time," which is the only way to check the inventory of Restore Points.

Not a single restore point in the house

As shown above, there were no Restore Points. None. Nada Zilch.

All is well?

The System Properties (see above) showed that Windows was indeed monitoring the C disk (which in English means that it should be making Restore Points). It had 399 megabytes of hard disk space allocated to System Restore, well above the 200 megabyte minimum. There were no errors on the event logs.

Why no Restore Points? Beats me. Fortunately, I was able to make one.

Help System Restore help you. Every couple weeks or so make sure it's still making Restore Points.

*System Restore also exists in Windows ME and Vista, but not in Windows 2000.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

[lnotenboom]

I'm somewhat surprised that System Restore is in your tool bag at all. As you've seen it's unreliable and confusing, at best. I get lots of reports of failures, many along the lines of what you've described. That, plus the fact that many people think it restores more than it actually does make it a non-starter for me.

My bottom line: there's still no substitute for a regular full system backup.

Leo
http://ask-leo.com

[koyophoto]

Norton GoBack is an excellent program that actually works. I got it for $10.

[john55440]

MH, what is your favorite brand of offline backup software (e.g. Norton Ghost 12) for Windows? Are there any brands that should be avoided, because of lack of reliability?

[mhinnewyork]

Leo: System Restore can be, and for me has been, useful. That's why it's so annoying that the application is unreliable and poorly designed. And needless to say, it is not documented in any way shape form or place that would be of any use to a non-technical person. Thus the mis-understanding of it's underlying purpose. And why isn't it part of the Security Center? Security sells newspapers, backup doesn't? I wonder if Macs or Linux have a similar feature?

Needless to say, I agree completely that there is no substitute for a regular disk image backup. But making one is beyond the abilities of many computer users.

koyophoto: GoBack has it's proponents, but I'm not one. It can indeed be very useful and is a huge step up from System Restore. But, a while back I read the manual (such as it is, brochure is probably a more accurate term) cover to cover and there are many gotchas with GoBack. That is, it interferes with a number of things and you always have to be aware of it's interference. For example, recently a disk image backup program refused to run because it detected the presence of GoBack. And if you are editing large files or making database updates, you probably need to turn it off beforehand.

john55440: Not sure what you mean by offline backup software. File backups or
disk image backups? As for Norton Ghost, I used a couple versions of the software (though not v12) and that was more than enough. I will not use it ever again.

Michael Horowitz

[ezsurfer]

Add one more to the list of Gotcha's with system Restore. Recently lost a laptop motherboard. When returned, system restore cannot function. Not sure exactly why, but it no longer recognizes the laptop as the same computer. And since when did a motherboard replacement delete the entire hard drive?

Welcome to Windows "Vista". So, since the computer came backas the originally as purchased XP, that is the way it shall stay.

On the backup front, HP now makes a Home Server. Looks like my kind of idea. Hardware to do what you can't afford not to be done right.


Clif