system restore time period

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Guest

I am running Windows XP home. My system restore only lets me go as far back
as a month ago. I need to go back to at least two months ago to possibly fix
my problem. Does anyone know how I can expand the System Restore timeframe?
It only lets me go back to Oct. but I need to go to September. Please help.
 
Sorry, but Restore Points cannot be expanded. It (SR) works on a
FIFO (First In, First Out) type of data chain. Once old points roll off
to make room for new ones - the old dates are no longer available.
System Restore is a "Short-Term" type of roll back or Undo function.
Attempting to use it beyond 2-3 weeks isn't a good idea. Better to
obtain an Imaging program and use that for protecting your XP setup.
 
Restore point are supposed to be available for up to 90 days. At this point I
can't verify it on my own computer but 90 days is refernced in MS KB article.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/plan/faqsrwxp.mspx

If a restore point is permanent, space usage for storing the complete chain
of restore points since the creation of the permanent restore point would
become very large and impractical. System Restore also provides a space
management feature to purge old restore points to make room for new ones,
creating a rolling safety net. Restore points over 90 days are purged
automatically by default.
 
thank you both,
I have two drives. I recently installed a new drive with a lot of disk
space. Is there a way I can move my system restore to that new drive so I
can get longer restore points? Or does system restore work off of both
drives?
 
i think that's a question for ms mvp!!
try to post question that way. "system restore save location"
look for bert kinney ms mvp ( author of bertk.mvps.org)

OR

could try to piggy back another thread he responded to and ask him there.
see posted today same newsgroup titled:
"system restore confirmation won't go away"
reply to bert kinney response
 
sross002 said:
I am running Windows XP home. My system restore only lets me go as far back
as a month ago. I need to go back to at least two months ago to possibly fix
my problem. Does anyone know how I can expand the System Restore timeframe?
It only lets me go back to Oct. but I need to go to September. Please help.
Click to expand...

If the restore points from September are no longer available then it
is not going to be possible to do this.

You can increase the size of the disk space allocated to system
restore so it can retain more days of available restore points, but
this is not advisable in my opinion.

System Restore is best used for "put my system back to the way it was
this morning" or "get me back to where I was before I installed
Crapware 2006" type situations. My experience has been that when
System Restore is used to go back more than a week or 10 days then it
is very likely to create more problems than it resolves.

If you would like to post the particulars of the problem that you are
trying to fix perhaps someone will have a solution for you.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

In memory of a dear friend Alex Nichol MVP
http://aumha.org/alex.htm
 
sross002 said:
thank you both,
I have two drives. I recently installed a new drive with a lot of disk
space. Is there a way I can move my system restore to that new drive so I
can get longer restore points?
Click to expand...

No. The only way to control this is to allocate more space for SR on
each drive upon which it's activated. And as others have said going
back 90 days is pretty much useless. Most often something gets
corrupted along the way, and won't work that far back, each point in the
chain must be good. And in practice going back more than a couple of
weeks creates more problems than it's worth. Understand that SR is not
a backup system. It's a means to recover from an oops. Use a drive
imaging program to save the system state at a prior time if that's what
you want to do.
 
Ron,

My problem is that when I try to download Java I get an error message
saying: "Could not create virtual machine" Is there a Java thread?
 
Ron is right, I would never rely upon SR to perform a reasonable restore
to "a couple of months ago". No more than 4 or 5 reboots ago is probably
ok, but beyond that you're taking a chance. That being said, it is
advised that you lower the amount of disk space that it uses, to approx. 1
GB per volume being monitored; the default is 12% of the volume, which is
way too large on todays HD's. And it leads people to think they can go
back 2 months and be ok. Back a couple of days is ok, weeks or months is
very unwise.

System Restore's REAL intent is to get you back to working after you mess
something up w/ a new install or driver (ie, an hour ago). It's not
supposed to get you going again weeks after a trojan has invaded your
system and done its nasty work.
 
sross002 said:
Ron,

My problem is that when I try to download Java I get an error message
saying: "Could not create virtual machine" Is there a Java thread?

"Ron Martell" wrote:
Click to expand...

FWI you shouldn't add on to another thread with a new problem. Start a
new thread.
 
sross002 said:
Ron,

My problem is that when I try to download Java I get an error message
saying: "Could not create virtual machine" Is there a Java thread?
Click to expand...

Exactly what Java are you trying to download? A Java-based
application, or the latest Java updates from the Sun website?

You should be running Java Runtime Environment Version 5.0 Update 5.
Check this in Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs. It will be listed
as "J2SE Runtime Environment Version 5.0 Update 5" If you do not
have this, get it from http://java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

Note that you will have to manually uninstall older versions of J2SE
and also any items listed as "Java 2 Runtime Environment ......."

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
 
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