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Win7 Can Delete All System Restore Points On Reboot
An anonymous reader writes "Astonishingly, the so-called system restore feature in Windows 7 deletes restore points without warning when the system is rebooted. This forum thread on answers.microsoft.com shows some of the users who have experienced the problem. Today I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (no dual boot), and noticed that whenever the machine rebooted after installing an application or driver, the disk churned for several minutes on the 'starting Windows' screen. Turns out that churning was the sound of my diligently created system restore points being deleted. Unfortunately I only found this out when Windows barfed at a USB dongle and I wanted to restore the system to an earlier state. This is an extraordinarily bad bug, which I suspect most Windows 7 users won't realise is affecting them until it's too late."
System restore has always been awful. It doesn't play well with anti-virus, it's slow, it's always been buggy. Worst part is I've only had it work to fix a problem for me ONCE in the couple of years I bothered with it. These days if I want to save the state of a computer that is working well I simply image the disk. More expensive and potentially time consuming but a hell of a lot more reliable.
Oh and don't image it with Windows 7 Microsoft tools. I had an issue with Vista's system restore tool once that had me scrambling for a copy of Virtual PC to read the images. (Vista system restore would just wipe the existing partitions then fail with an error before restoring a thing).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's kdawson. You can't expect fact-checking.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
So a few people have a problem with windows? It's not even widespread!
This wouldn't have made it to slashdot if it weren't for the oh-so-common hatred for windows around these lands.
But ... many are still using windows and praying to their $invisible_man_in_the_sky. The future is here, but half of you didn't get the memo.
Please stop preaching Linux like a religion.
The fact is I can get a lot of software on Windows that is unmatched on Linux. When I want to run Linux software, I can usually get a version that works on Windows, but if I can't I run Linux (either on a VM or on physical hardware).
Oh and by the way I have a degree in Astronomy. In this area there's a lot very good Windows only software, and a lot of very good Linux only software. I'm not about to shut myself out of using any of it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's kdawson. You can't expect fact-checking.
I kind of think this guy takes a bit of undeserved heat sometimes, but the 'story' here is a link to a forum thread with fewer than 10 posts (at the time of this reply). That doesn't seem front page worthy, well, anywhere.
> Yes. if a system is important to you,
I try not to keep anything important on windows boxes or laptops so I never have to bother to back them up. So far, the only thing I found out the hard way I had to backup is my configuration file for game controls that the Logitech Profiler uses. It took me quite a while to reconfigure my games when Windows failed.
In some way, I could pretend that I do not have to trust Windows for the integrity of my data. I use shares on my file server to save things and repositories when versioning is needed.
I would feel very handicapped with only a Windows box at my disposition. Yet, I realize that this is exactly what most people have. Most of the people I know lose data when their Windows computer crash. I just can't afford it so of course I also implemented a proper backup procedure on my Unix hosts but I swear I have none for Windows boxes.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
In any case - whenever I have encountered problems with Windows I have never been able to get any useful recovery by using the "Last known good configuration..." It has always been a reinstall if I weren't able to boot normally.
So I would say that the system recovery feature is erratic as it is at best.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The latest Ubuntu 10.X is so good it is scary. Why anyone wants to run a Windows machine is really beyond my understanding. Do yourself a huge favor and climb off the Microsoft teat.
Maybe because some people have work to do? Maybe because they get paid to use windows applications? Or maybe because they want to run some specific applications such as games that won't run well on the latest Ubuntu?
Not everyone WANTS to fiddle with their computer, some just want to do stuff with it then go away and do something else. This is why the Mac is popular too. Narrowing yourself down to a single choice of OS and outright saying "Ubuntu is better!" is just foolish. It is like saying that Perl is better than C - but you don't even know what the problem is that is trying to be solved yet! It might be that a totally different language is better than perl or C, but without knowing what the goal is, you can't pick the best solution.
For the record, I am typing this on an iMac, with a XP Pro system next to me, and a Mythbuntu system off to the side as well as 2 other machines that I often change out OS'es on for different purposes. (Currently Redhat is on them at the moment).
Outright saying "Why anyone Wants to run Windows" ignores that different people want different things from their computers. Your solution is not theirs.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
It can be the problem. But is this the default for Win7? If so, it's Microsoft's fault anyway, as if a single restore point eats up 550Mb the default total limit could never be set to 700Mb.
Another question is why the restore point uses half a gig, when XPs restore points are a lot smaller than that...
--- Illogical Spock
On the contrary. It is *extremely* rude to throw up a confirmation dialog before every trivial system maintenance task.
As has been pointed out below, System Restore is basically only useful for resolving problems so severe they prevent your system from booting. Once your system has booted you don't really need older restore points, and they take up a *lot* of space. Deleting them is absolutely the right decision for the average user. The *real* problem here is probably the UI for creating system restore points not mentioning the deletion policies and generally misleading people into believing that creating restore points manually is a useful thing to do.
These people creating restore points all the time remind me of the people who get obsessed with defragmenting their disks every night...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The fact is, advanced tools are just that, advanced. Windows comes with bare metal tools, and the ability to properly configure a daily, weekly, etc, backup on external disk. And there are more advanced features for the adventurous. I guarantee you I won't lose data if my Windows box dies. I have daily backups, a RAID10 internal with a hot spare, blah blah blah. But I'm not a typical user.
And neither are you. We both know how to use our OS to protect our data, even if it involved what appears to be wizardry to the average user. I really wish backup were easier. Windows 7 actually informs the user regularly that they don't have a backup, and will continue to warn them if a backup ever fails. That's great progress, but it's maybe not yet good enough. Let me know when a popular Linux distro supports bare metal backup and a snapshotting filesystem with the ability to "go back in time" to a good state, I look forward to that day. Until then, you have your wizardry, I have my slightly-less-magical-looking GUI that manages most of it for me built in. *shrugs*
IMO, I'd like to get to the point where OSes, Windows, Mac, Linux, really, seriously warn the user the moment their data isn't safe. It's one thing for Windows 7 to pop up a notification balloon, or for OS X to complain that Time Machine isn't set up, but I feel like there should be more than that. And on Linux, I don't think there's anything comparable at the moment.