System Restore

[Garry Russell]

I used to leave System restore off as the shop advice it was trouble

The I was increasingly advice to turn it on as it was useful

Trouble is on the few time I have tried to use it I can't HELP

Just tried again and the same....no matter what point I pick is says it's can't restore back to that point :brick:

Maybe I should just reclaim the 12% disc space it's using :think:

Any ideas anyone???

Garry

[nigelb]

Gary, I don't know the answer as to why system restore won't work for you, but I can tell you I would advise reducing the size from 12% to something less. I use 3%. The reason for this is you probably will only want to restore to the last backup or so (that is if you can get it working.) Using 12% would probably give you several weeks of backup. If you did go to one of the earlier restore point, you would loose a lot of changes made since that time. If you use the last backup or so, you will loose only the changes since that backup.

You can adjust the amount o disk space used by System Restore in the control panel "System" applet. click on the "System Restore" tab and adjust the slider, moving it left reduces the amount of disk space used. In other words, you probably don't need 30+ seperate restore points, 7 or 8 is probably enough.

There is a lot of misunderstanding of what System Restore actually does. A good article can be found here:

http://ask-leo.com/why_cant_i_rely_on_s ... ckups.html
Read the comments also - apparently you can't adjust the size in Vista, you can in XP.

I am curious, what problems are you having that prompted you to try System Restore?

A few additional thoughts - you could try turning system restore off, then restarting it. This might fix the problem you mention of not being able to restore. Then immediatly set a manual restore point and see if that works. That way you will know right away whether you can rely on it or not.

N²

[Garry Russell]

Hi Nigel

In this case I want to go back quite a bit as I want to try something before I added a window upgrade back in July

But having said that I wish any of it would work

Thanks for the link

Garry

EDIT

Read the link.yes it's not a data back up just registry and a few other things but I thought it was always clear anyway that's all it is :think:

One of the reasons why I never really missed it before.

I will look at rolling back.

[nigelb]

Well, keep in mind that Leo's intent in that article was to convince everyone to do full hard disk backups. System Restore does back up the registry, but also backs up changes to drivers, and other system files. It won't back up anything in Documents and Settings. The main advantage of having it is you install some drivers and it mucks things up, you can do a restore and undo the change in short order. In fact I always set a manual restore point before installing drivers.

BTW, going back to July with system restore would mean your registry would be restored from that date - If there have been a lot of change to the registry since then and I am sure there would be, you could really have a mess on your hands. If you want to uninstall a windows update, try Add and Remove programs (tick the show updates box). A lot of windows updates have uninstall entries listed - the only problem is they are listed by KB # so you will have to know what the KB number is for what you want to uninstall. You can probably find that out with the MS knowledge base but that is not the easiest thing to use to say the least. :roll:

N²

[Garry Russell]

Hi Nigel

The intention was to restore back to that, try something out then come back to now

In the meantime I manually uninstalled the componants and done the test and am re installing them

I've not added any programme since that July date and everything is backed up.

But it won't even restore back to yesterday so I'll turn it off as it has never been any use to me.

Thanks for your help though Nigel

Garry

[nigelb]

Ah, I see! Glad you got it done. Much better than if you had been able to restore to July and then when you wanted to come back, restore refused to work. :doho: This is starting to sound like a plot line for Doctor Who.

Rose and I will step into the Tardis and leave. (OK, she does in my dreams :prayer: )

N²

[Garry Russell]

I had a report that I had hidden some updates

Anyhow it refused to add the latest updates as it couldn't find the hidden

So I uninstalled all the updates I had, then went to update and the first option was SP3 and after that was updated everything else went in smoothly bar a security update for SP1 which it ignored.

So it looks like I didhave some oddity there left over from the time I uninstalled zone alarm as that was making the latest windows updates kick me off the web constantly.

Anyhow all seem OK now

Garry

[nigelb]

Good to hear everything looks ok.

N²