Disable System Restore for virtual drives?

[Guest]

Hoping this is the right group for this question:

I regularly mount virtual drives for short periods of time. System Restore
apparently tries to "monitor" the virtual drives, which is causing real
problems -- I've been regularly losing all my restore points, and the
numerous System Restore errors in the event viewer all refer to drive letters
used by the virtual drives, leading SR to stop monitoring and lose everything.

I can't turn off monitoring on these virtual drive letters when they're not
mounted, and now I'm afraid to mount them again -- I have valuable restore
points I do NOT want to lose.

Adding to the problem, I may mount several virtual drives at once, and the
drive letters are not always the same, depending on what letters are
available.

Can anyone help? How can I keep System Restore from monitoring virtual
drives when they're mounted?

 

[Sharon F]

Hoping this is the right group for this question:

I regularly mount virtual drives for short periods of time. System Restore
apparently tries to "monitor" the virtual drives, which is causing real
problems -- I've been regularly losing all my restore points, and the
numerous System Restore errors in the event viewer all refer to drive letters
used by the virtual drives, leading SR to stop monitoring and lose everything.

I can't turn off monitoring on these virtual drive letters when they're not
mounted, and now I'm afraid to mount them again -- I have valuable restore
points I do NOT want to lose.

Adding to the problem, I may mount several virtual drives at once, and the
drive letters are not always the same, depending on what letters are
available.

Can anyone help? How can I keep System Restore from monitoring virtual
drives when they're mounted?

Don't rely on System Restore for "valuable" restore points. It is intended
only to fix slight "oops" situations and to guard system files.

You could try monitoring the Windows drive only. More than likely you will
still get \System Volume Information\ folders on the virtual drives. These
contain the bare minimum of volume info and do not accumulate changes as
active volumes do.

After restricting monitoring to the Windows drive only, you still might
lose restore points when the drive layout changes (removing a virtual
drive). That's an automatic for how system restore works. I don't know of
any way to change that behavior.

Restricting works when drives/volumes are static and only external drives
appear now and then. I'm not confident it's going to work in your situation
but may be worth a try.

Maybe someone else has better news for you but it seems to me that the
style of work (frequent adding/removing of volumes) is going to cause the
loss of restore points.

Regardless of how the system restore scenario works out, I would suggest
investing in some imaging software. It sounds like it would be a good
investment for you and it would enable you to restore the system in a
matter of minutes if things go pear shape during your experiments with
virtual drives. Personally, I use Acronis True Image but there are others
available. Ghost and Image for Windows (terabyteunlimited.com) get
mentioned and recommended often too.

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi,

This is also posted you your previous post.

External hard drives present a similar problem with System Restore.
System Restore by default will try to monitor every partition it sees.
In the case of an external drive, assigning a permanent drive letter can
sometimes keep System Restore from monitoring it, which you seem to have
tried. I suspect that the only choice is to choose between System
Restore or the virtual drive.

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi Kenny,

Can you explain what exactly do you mean by "virtual drives"
there are too many things that could be called that.
As sharon said you can set system restore to monitor only
the windows drive. You will not have a problem.

The problem is that System Restore is seeing the virtual drive as a new
drive. When this happens, monitoring of the virtual drive is turned on
automatically. The same thing happens with external drives. Setting a
permanent drive letter sometimes prevents monitoring from being started.

A problem with system restore will only occur if
a virus scanner goes inside the system volume information
and deletes a file (even if it is a virus).

Normally this does not happen. Most virus programs will detect infection
within the SVI folder by will not remove them. This is why it is
suggested that all restore points be purged after cleaning is complete
and the system is functioning correctly, to prevent re-infection.

 

[kenny]

Can you explain what exactly do you mean by "virtual drives"
there are too many things that could be called that.
As sharon said you can set system restore to monitor only
the windows drive. You will not have a problem.
A problem with system restore will only occur if
a virus scanner goes inside the system volume information
and deletes a file (even if it is a virus).
System restore works like a chain and the restore points
are dependant upon eachother.