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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."
tar zcvf `date '+%Y%m%d'`_configs.tgz /etc
m ... strange that your config backup isn't working. Mine is working beautifully!
Off course, I don't need to use it, ever, because my operating system works.
Come on guys! it's 2010! Computers are awesome, and we are exploring space more than ever. We discovered the whole human genome, and everyone has a touchscreen in their pocket! 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.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Once your system has booted you don't really need older restore points
This is completely untrue. If the OS was perfect, you'd be correct, but Win7 is flawed. Just a few weeks ago I fixed an issue where an update had completely broken DNS for someone.
I had to roll back almost 2 months for the customer. I guess that's how long it took for DNS entries to expire, and them to get around to bringing it to me?
If you approach it from the angle that Windows 7 is flawed, and any part could break at any moment(from installing an update, a new program, a driver, etc.), then clearly deleting old restore points is not the way to go.
It does this automatically. I kept noticing that shortcuts (to oft got places deep in my filesystem) I'd put on my desktop kept vanishing without warning. After some googling I found out it was a new "feature" of Windows 7. Where as XP used to tell you, Windows 7 assumes the user is too stupid to comprehend and blunders off to do it without so much as a warning.
Eventually I found there was an undocumented (and confusingly named) service I could disable to stop this from happening.
What would posses Microsoft's programmers to do this? Presumably the same thing that possesses them to delete system restores. Really, Microsoft is so made of fail.
So should we submit a Slashdot article for every bug in every Linux distro of this approximate severity?
Look, if you don't like Windows, that's fine. I can understand that, and I can even emphasize with it. But articles like this are just embarrassing. If you have to stretch *this* far to make Windows 7 look bad, then Windows is looking pretty goddamned good.
This is not news. It's certainly not "stuff that matters."
Comment of the year