System Restore question

[Pflueger]

I have had my System Restore set to maximum all along and normally there are
restore points scattered for the past month or two. I do this because I DL
and try lots of programs and have at times needed to go back a good ways to
find an acceptable restore point.

Recently I tried to restore, found there were only a few restored points
saved, all recent, and none of them would work except by using safe mode.

What could cause these changes? Might it have anything to do with the size
of my page file (I recently lowered it).

Thanks,

Pflu

 

[Richard in AZ]

I have had my System Restore set to maximum all along and normally there are
restore points scattered for the past month or two. I do this because I DL
and try lots of programs and have at times needed to go back a good ways to
find an acceptable restore point.

Recently I tried to restore, found there were only a few restored points
saved, all recent, and none of them would work except by using safe mode.

What could cause these changes? Might it have anything to do with the size
of my page file (I recently lowered it).

Thanks,

Pflu

Your procedures of change, then restore, would be better suited to getting an external hard drive
and a mirror backup program. You are abusing the System Restore purpose.

 

[Unknown]

You download and try lots of programs?? Bad practice. Some malware will
reset your
system restore to prevent you from deleting their program via the restore.

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi Pful,

First of all System Restore was not designed to remove programs, and should
not be used to do so.

System Restore does not completely uninstall applications when restoring to
a point prior to the applications installation. What happens is, System
Restore only removes the monitored files for the installed applications and
the remaining non-monitored files are left behind. Any registry entries made
by the installation of the application will also be gone. This will cause
the application not to function. And in some cases, cause the uninstall and
reinstall process of the partially removed application to fail. This is why
it is recommended to uninstall any applications installed after the restore
point you will be restoring to. If the uninstall and reinstall fail, try to
undo the restore point, uninstall the application in question, then perform
the restore again. The only other option would be to manually remove (for
advanced users) leftover files, folders, shortcuts, and registry entries.

Troubleshooting missing restore points:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/missingrps.html

And here are some troubleshooting steps to take when System Restore fails to
restore:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/srfail.html

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

 

[Pflueger]

Thanks, but....

1) I have an external HDD. I clone, and backup my files
regularly.

2) I have been DLing applications safely for 20 years,
carefully weeding out the odd malware because I am cautious with much
scanning with many anti-malware apps. How can you generalize that it is bad
to DL? There is nothing wrong with DLing programs prudently. I have never
had a problem over malware but I have had situations where conflicts
occurred unrelated to malware that I could only fix by going back a ways in
System restore.

I didn't ask for a preacher, I asked a specific question which you both
totally ignored. If you have no answers, please ignore my posts.

Thanks,

Pflu

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

System Restore is a FIFO buffer, and the size of that buffer and the size of
the points determines the number left available. Windows Update (and other
installs) usually kick out a lot of stuff. Your good backups are the only
way to guarantee anything more than recent changes.

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Mark L. Ferguson

..

 

[Bill in Co.]

Hi Pful,

First of all System Restore was not designed to remove programs, and
should
not be used to do so.

System Restore does not completely uninstall applications when restoring
to
a point prior to the applications installation. What happens is, System
Restore only removes the monitored files for the installed applications
and
the remaining non-monitored files are left behind. Any registry entries
made
by the installation of the application will also be gone. This will cause
the application not to function. And in some cases, cause the uninstall
and
reinstall process of the partially removed application to fail. This is
why
it is recommended to uninstall any applications installed after the
restore
point you will be restoring to.

I'm not sure I get this. If you restore back to pt A, anything installed
*after* pt A isn't really installed anymore (in the registry, or so far as
Add-Remove knows of), so you couldn't "uninstall" what's left over from the
app on the HD even if you wanted to. The only way to clean that up would
be to reinstall the app (to get it back into the registry and Add-Remove),
and THEN uninstall it. Or, just go delete the apps files on the disk
manually.

 

[Unknown]

Your post said nothing about an external HDD. You only mentioned system
restore.