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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."

3 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Can't be affecting all users by kjart · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:System restore stinks. Image your disk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    i'll freely admit that AD beats anything Linux has to offer in a number of ways, but for patch/package management, RHEL's tools blow WSUS out of the water. WSUS is misery to administer, and offers no way to legitimately push updates, only to make them available the next time the server tries to update. It also forces you to do everything by group, no one off specific updates to a particular server, which is a minor thing, except for when you need it.

  3. Re:How prevalent? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?" `":" #");}