system restore inoperative

system restore will not restore to any previous restore point

 

Hello ted and welcome to the board,

You probably have a corrupt restore point somewhere in the chain of Restore Points, the integrity of each restore point is dependent on the previous one.

Shut SR off: My Computer > Properties > System Retore tab > Check "Turn off System Restore on all drives" - below, if multiple drives - have the option to differentiate.

Reboot.

Go back and re-enable SR - will create an initial restore point.

After re-establishing SR, a way to test the Restore function:


Take any executable file ( extention .exe) , and burn it out and/or move it to the My Documents folder and delete it from it's original location. SR does not monitor files in My Documents folder regardless of file type.

Then restore to the initial restore point created by the system; the deleted executable should be back in it's original location. Afterwards, you can delete the copy in My Documents.

FYI: The file types (extensions) SR monitors

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sr/sr/monitoring_the_system.asp

Regards - Charles

 

My apologies for not responding. System Restore functioning again, Thanks for your assistance

 

Thanks Ted for letting us know.

Regards - Charles

 

Two comments on System Restore:

1. It is a fantastic feature! It works incredibly well. At least in my limited experience.

2. I discovered that if you temprorarily disable the system restore, it deletes ALL previous system restore points. This seems crazy. Is there an option somewhere so you don't lose all your pervious restore points when you disable it?

I disable it when I do a "system sweep" as recommended by my anti-virus software. It makes since to me because you want those old restore points examined for viruses as well. But it seems like you should just turn it back on an the old restore points shoud still be there but they are not.

 

Hi crockett,

Is there an option somewhere so you don't lose all your pervious restore points when you disable it?
Not as far as I know.

I disable it when I do a "system sweep" as recommended by my anti-virus software. It makes since to me because you want those old restore points examined for viruses as well.
Don't get that. If you want to examine restore points, then why the clearing of them?

I use two different AV's - NOD and NAV, neither recomend disabling SR for other than if virus/malware found. Could you specify more clearly what your AV recomends?

Regards - Charles

 

Charles is right. It really shouldn't be necessary to disable system restore unless a virus is found. You'd want to disable it then because if you remove the virus you could get it back again if you restored your computer and the virus was in the restore files you used. The system restore files are off limits to all other programs. Your anti virus can't clean them so in order to rid the restore files of the virus it's necessary to delete the files. If no virus is found, there should be no problem.