System Restore - External Hard Drive

G

Guest

Is System Restore able to use an external hard drive to capture the restore
points? If so, how is that configured?
 
B

Bert Kinney

Hi Salty,

If you are referring to backing up restore points to an external drive, then
the answer is no, and here's why.

By designed and under normal conditions System Restore will automatically
create a new restore point every 24 hours.

When the allotted disk space is reached, the oldest restore point will be
purged on a first in first out (FIFO) basis. Otherwise, restore points over
90 days are purged automatically by default.

Each one of these restore points are chained (or linked) together with
previous restore points. When a restore point is chosen, all restore point
created prior to that restore point are also required to complete the
restoration.

While all of this is going on, in real time, a log is being created or
updated that tracks the consistency between the files System Restore is
monitoring, and the files that are actually backed up. If an inconsistency
is found between the log file and the files located in the System Volume
Information folder, restore point corruption can occur. In turn this causes
the chain to become broken and any prior restore points to become useless,
thus causing System Restore to fail at a restore. At this point all restore
points would have to be purged to remove the corruption. So you can see,
backing up and restoring restore points would cause an inconsistency in the
restore log thus causing corruption and the loss of all restore points.

Note: Any changes made within the System Volume Information folder (where
System Restore stores restore information) will almost certainly cause the
same corruption.

Regards,
Bert Kinney MS-MVP Shell/User
http://bertk.mvps.org
Member: http://dts-l.org
 
G

Guest

Bert,

Thanks for the feedback. That was very clear. I was thinking that if
System Restore could use an external drive, then it could be used to restore
a hard drive that had crashed and needed to be replaced. From you
description, that doesn't seem possible since the restore points are on the
same drive that failed. One would need to use a product such as Norton Ghost
or True Image to accomplish that.
 

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