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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 reboots you!
I don't know if anyone's been in the same situation as I have, but the only times I've had to use system restore were a disaster. For virus infections, the restore data tends to be infected too, so that's useless. For restoring from bad drivers, applications, etc. the only time I had to do that I went from no network connection to BSoD on boot which took me two days to fix.
I have disabled System Restore now, and I never ever suggest using it to anyone I know.
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
Yea...uh...system restore...yea. Better off using a full disk imaging utility, or using a 3rd party backup manager like Acronis or whatnot.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I just checked and I have 9 restore points going back two weeks. I would have restarted several times in that period. The summary makes it sound as if this is a bug that affects all users. I don't think that is the case.
Yeah or maybe it's not affecting most Windows 7 users.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I've used System Restore on my Win7 64-bit systems. If Win7 really had a habit of deleting System Restore points, it would have been detected and harped upon within hours of its release, 32-bit or 64-bit. Whatever the problem is, it's hard to believe it's Windows' fault.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Last resort of the desperate! Failed restore ahoy!! Batten down the ram hatches, load the cache cannon and pray lads, pray!
It's going to be a rough one! A working restore is like catching the white whale. Sure you can do it but it might kill you
in the process.
I thought I had this, but then I double checked and realized I had my system restore max space set to 700mb. My single restore point was taking up 555mb of this. I upped the space. Maybe some people are being too over zealous with cranking down the space? (I forgot how much it took up when I set it I guess.)
[Edit: Looks like the accepted solution on that thread simply increases the space allocated to System Restore! I could be right, maybe?]
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.
It is impolite, if not rude, not to throw up a warning message or error message, though. You never delete data without giving the user a chance to say no.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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
Got to be smarter than that. I dislike monopolies and MS as much as anyone, but finding problems and publicizing them will only help test it and reduce QA labor costs for Microsoft. It won't make people not use it, or wonder if Linux or anything else is better. Testing some programs for Linux will be better, talking to people managing various projects, writing user manuals for a few programs. Wine HQ has lots of programs that need testing and installation instructions. Questioning copyrights and patents could get some results, campaigning for legislation change. But just bashing Microsoft and saying "in Linux it is better" won't do much.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE /tmp ON BOOT option!
Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in /tmp, but still no excuse.
Given the recent similar issue with supposedly buggy Windows updates, I say this is an undetected root kit cleaning up after itself.
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Are you kidding me? /tmp is TEMPORARY! It's transient - that's the whole point!
Programs that store data of ANY permanence in /tmp are broken. People who store data of ANY permanence in /tmp are foolish.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I would temper the grandparent's statement by saying it depends on which data you're talking about. I mean, /tmp is supposed to be a temporary storage location - even the name tells you so. The whole point of it existing is so that you (well, the OS) can cache things there and trust that they're not going to sit around forever hogging disk space without having to remember to delete them explicitly. So I would expect that to be wiped on boot. (Same applies to temporary folders in Windows or any other system) Other data, though, I would generally expect to be kept. Especially System Restore points, which are pretty much useless if your last one is going to get deleted automatically.
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
Foolish? I think that's an understatement. Using temp for storage is like getting angry when people flush your shit down a toilet.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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?" `":" #");}
i don't know about you but i prefer to be alone while i'm taking a dump, and I generally flush before opening the door. so, if someone is in there with me flushing before i leave, then i'd probably be a little pissed.
That is where I keep all of my important documents.
I have a nasty habbit of wiping out my home directory and ever since the janitor app died it's been a good world writable location.
Now I can share important projects, personal documents and data troves.
In fact the tmp directory worked so well for my data needs that I moved all of home to that directory. I wanted to facilitate synergy between users.
Eventually a friend gave me a wonderful suggestion of migrating the entire operating system to tmp. Through a clever array of symlinks I have moved all the original folders to tmp and created links in the original locations. I now have the best of both worlds!
This is pretty much all thanks to a friend of mine who has a sys admin gig at a nearby college. He's even helping me work out a new system of backups via the high speed tape interface "/dev/null."
He is pretty friendly so if you are on irc you can look him up under his nick BOFH for some friend sys admin tips.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
There are some people who view taking a dump as an artistic expression and don't bother to flush the toilet. At one company I worked for, this became known as a "cherry bomb" whenever you come upon an unflushed toilet. Seriously, some people shouldn't be eating at Taco Bell everyday.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Speaking of auto-flushing toilets, am I the only one who is somewhat disturbed that the urinal knows when I put my manliness away?
LKG isn't System Restore. It simply rolls back part of the registry (HKEY_SYSTEM/Current Control Set) to the last time it booted successfully. Any damage to HKEY_Software or the file system isn't covered. I've also had things crash after it decided that the current CCS is good, making the next reboot a pain. It's mostly there to deal with buggy newly installed drivers.
It makes perfect sense to remove the oldest restore point when there is not enough room to create a new one. No matter how much disk space you allocate to System Restore at some point you are going to fill it up. Having it prompt the user would cause it to prompt every time after that. For people who don't understand System Restore very well this kind of prompt might lead to more harm than good. If someone gets a warning saying their system restore space is full, they might clear it out completely, especially if they were getting this message on a regular basis.
15% of disk space is the default size.
The point of system restore is to ensure that if you mess up your computer with recent updates or changes you have an easy restoration option. So, on a typical new PC with 1TB you would have 150GB. Per the grandparent, a typical restore was taking 555mb for him. You do the math.
Now to assume that a user will be prompted on every single boot or system change after the limit is pretty silly when this will almost only ever affect someone who has changed from the default value. Users who leave this setting to default will never suffer this fate.
It seems that the submitter of the article has "tweaked" his machine so much that he only saves 1 restore point and therefore waits EVERY boot for the system restore to do what it should do.
The System Restore function is a favorite hiding place for malicious programs. So Microsoft finally fixed it?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Just to help you understand: "Last known good configuration" is a copy of your registry (or rather a subset thereof) at the point of your last successful log in. If you log in successfully, but something does not work, then the "last known good configuration" was just saved and is of no use in that situation. This is NOT system restore.
System restore is more than just the registry. If you cannot login (even after trying "last known good configuration"), then you can try system restore by booting off of the OS CD/DVD and "repairing" your installation. If you log in successfully and something does not work, then you can also try system restore. And yes, system restore WILL fix your computer by bringing it to an older state at which everything worked, given that: 1) you don't have hardware issues 2) a virus has not infested your restore points and 3) you have restore points before the problem started.
Several times windows update has borked internet access outside the local subnet[1]. In one of the cases it wouldn't even connect to MS, so it couldn't fix itself. Rolling back to a restore point did the trick. I then waited a few days till the fix for the fix was out...
P.S. I have it set to "Check, but ask before installing". Anyone else find that sometimes it just goes ahead and does it?
[1] I think it does this when there's a pending update for IE.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nope. I have run into this bug, and I have 20Gb set for SR. I figured it was a dual boot issue, as I noticed whenever I booted into XP32 and then back to W7 x64 my SR points went bye bye.
For those that have a single boot I would recommend Comodo Time Machine as I have been using this for quite awhile and it works great. Unfortunately it doesn't like how W7 changes partition letters on the fly, so if you dual boot with W7 installed on anything other than C: it won't work. But if you are running single boot XP/Vista/W7, it is a great tool to use and much better than SR IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Whereas Windows 7 is more like when someone takes an upper decker at your party - you are in for a nasty surprise later...
The urinal knows nothing...
The janitor on the other hand, sitting in his room behind his desk filled with rows of video monitors, VCR's and 'flush' buttons...
Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE /tmp ON BOOT option! /tmp, but still no excuse.
Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in
To be fair, I blame this on a lack of good Linux documentation.
Referencing the gentoo howto titled "Production database environment on tmpfs ramdisk" section 3 subsection 2a, they provide clear and simple wiring guides for attaching a car battery to your RAM, thus removing the need to reboot and preserving your /tmp data.
To summarize, get yourself a car battery and a set of old jumper cables.
Cut the connectors off one end of the cables, and strip about 1/8th inch of insulation off the end, twisting the stranded wires together.
Then, take the exposed wire end of the jumper cables, and carefully align it with the 5 volt pin 134 of your first DIMM.
Take care not to touch either of the pins next to it, or any other exposed surfaces!
The 3/4th inch diameter wire of the jumper cables will make this especially tricky, but persistence is a virtue. Keep trying, it will fit eventually!
Just duct tape the negative wire to the metal of the case.
Then attach the jumper cables to the battery following normal car jumping procedures (Ground first, then hot, with the engine running) and crank gentoo over.
If you would like to help others avoid this simple mistake and many hours of frustration, you should join my freshmeat project group to form a policy to vote on the wording of the bug report to raise this documentation files priority for inclusion with the official documentation.
[Edit: Looks like the accepted solution on that thread simply increases the space allocated to System Restore! I could be right, maybe?]
Wait! You can edit slashdot posts after posting? I thought they were final! When did this happen?
[Edit: Wow. This is amazing. Looks like its working here on my end. How about you guys?]
My page.
There's a wealthy woman on my block who's been married so many times that she keeps her wedding pictures in a temporary folder.
(DVD's are on sale in the lobby, don't forget to tip your waitress.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
We've got a bathroom full of auto flushing urinals and toilets at my work. The bathroom also has motion controlled lights. Somehow the flush sensors aren't quite calibrated correctly, so the first person to enter the room after the lights have been off for a while gets to experience a symphony of half a dozen toilets flushing together. It's pretty weird first thing in the morning.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And they erase all my memory too! All of it just gone, empty blank state every time I pull the power! And when I took out my HD and cleaned it under the tap to get the dirty bits out, Gentoo totally failed to work with my freshly cleaned drive!!!
And to remain on topic, anyone actually use system restore? Always disable that as fast as possible.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yesterday I needed to boot into windows (the D&DI Character Generator doesn't work in wine, as far as I can tell), and I was greeted after boot with a lovely screen telling me that the system was broken and in need of repair. So my two options were restore from backup or repair. I had no backup, so I went to repair, and under "select drive," there was no system install. Windows had apparently uninstalled itself.
I'm still trying to sort out what happened.
P.S.=> Are they actually DOING that (fostering this type of sentiment around here)? I don't know, but, it would make a LOT of sense from the site owner's perspective @ least, to actually do so, for the purposes of monetary gain via website page hits adbanner monetary generation! apk
My guess is that they're too incompetent to be doing it on purpose, but they might luck into it.
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