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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."
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.
Warning: Your style of discussion hinders M$ bashing on slashdot and might get you banned.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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?]
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!
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.
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.
It is easier to push updates to Linux boxes, except those updates aren't just a small smattering of MS updates, but rather for every application installed on the box.
There are some nice virtues to Microsoft's myriad of enterprise tools. But suggesting that Windows boxes are easier to manage for software updates is not one of them.
Then again, one can also argue that instead of fucking with group policy and MS exploit patches, you could just run Linux and run secure boxes that are far easier to secure in the first place.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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?" `":" #");}
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
Tired of this misconception. Seriously. I've been using Windows software for 14 years, and I have NEVER had to do a full system reinstall. EVER. People who need to reinstall Windows all of the time are doing something really really wrong. I'm not sure what, nor do I care. I'm not a zealot, Windows sucks in more ways than I can shake a stick at. I've done my fair share of cursing and screaming at it over the last decade and a half, but there hasn't been a damn thing I haven't been able to fix without the need to reinstall the whole thing.
I have 14 restore points dating back to 3/29/2010 which is about when I installed Windows 7 on this machine.
A quick Bing search brought me to another thread where the guy's problem turned out to be a disk defrag utility that was deleting restore points on reboot. He disabled the utility, and the restores stopped disappearing.
For what it's worth, does a forum post from January with a total of five people reporting a problem really deserve to be on Slashdot? Oh wait, it's anti-MS. Nevermind.
-David