A word to the wise regarding System Restore (or: "A Cautionary Tale)

I had some issues lately with my Toshiba's sound, so to make a long
story short I decided to restore to a restore point 3 days prior. What
a frickin' mess that caused! Many programs(long ago installed) wouldn't
open and as soon as I got to the desktop, there were 3 error messages
awaiting me regarding the failure of some Toshiba startup items like the
fingerprint reader, the power management, etc. I also couldn't get
several programs to run, and autoprotect was DOA in Norton.

I'm so used to my XP PC's holding more than a month's worth of restore
points, I was shocked to see less than a week's worth on Vista. Anyway,
I tried to unrestore and that didn't help. Now I'm getting desperate!
I figure it's either reload Vista time, or try another restore point
point. I pick out a restore point and hold my breath...seems this time
I got no more dead programs. whew!

Now if i could just fix the frickin' issue with sound distortion. sigh.

Dave

David [Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:49:05 -0700] wrote:

>I'm so used to my XP PC's holding more than a month's worth of restore
>points, I was shocked to see less than a week's worth on Vista.

The oldest restore point in my Vista is dated July 17th 2007.
Are you sure you displayed *all* the restore points available?

Marco

On Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:49:05 -0700, David <David@invalid.com> wrote:

>I had some issues lately with my Toshiba's sound, so to make a long
>story short I decided to restore to a restore point 3 days prior. What
>a frickin' mess that caused! Many programs(long ago installed) wouldn't
>open and as soon as I got to the desktop, there were 3 error messages
>awaiting me regarding the failure of some Toshiba startup items like the
>fingerprint reader, the power management, etc. I also couldn't get
>several programs to run, and autoprotect was DOA in Norton.
>
>I'm so used to my XP PC's holding more than a month's worth of restore
>points, I was shocked to see less than a week's worth on Vista. Anyway,
>I tried to unrestore and that didn't help. Now I'm getting desperate!
>I figure it's either reload Vista time, or try another restore point
>point. I pick out a restore point and hold my breath...seems this time
>I got no more dead programs. whew!
>
>Now if i could just fix the frickin' issue with sound distortion. sigh.
>
>Dave

That's the way system restore is supposed to work.
--
more pix @ http://members.toast.net/cbminfo/index.html

This is one feature that I don't know if it's better than the XpP's. I think
that XP has more System Restore options. I've done a few Vista system
restores and have noticed that:

-I lose programs that I have installed after the restore point.
-Vista creates a new restore point each time you download a program or any
update including a Microsoft update.
-Vista will use up to about 10-15 per cent of disc space for restore points.
Once it runs out of that space it will begin to delete restore points.
-sometimes I can't go back further than 10 days.

But I am surprised that you can't restore your system to a place before your
last restore in order to undo the damage that the last restore did. I never
had that problem. Do you think that you may have "harmed" some Vista OS files?

Also: Last night I bought Acronis True Inage Home Backup 10. Today, I backed
up my entire drive since it is running smoothly now. I'm going to use Acronis
as my last resort System Restore. It took less than 35 minutes to back up my
hard drive's OS and documents. (I have less than 15 GB of data and documents
on my drive.)


oscar
-

"Marco Desloovere" wrote:

> David [Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:49:05 -0700] wrote:
>
> >I'm so used to my XP PC's holding more than a month's worth of restore
> >points, I was shocked to see less than a week's worth on Vista.
>
> The oldest restore point in my Vista is dated July 17th 2007.
> Are you sure you displayed *all* the restore points available?
>
> Marco
>

oscar wrote:
> This is one feature that I don't know if it's better than the XpP's. I think
> that XP has more System Restore options. I've done a few Vista system
> restores and have noticed that:
>
> -I lose programs that I have installed after the restore point.
> -Vista creates a new restore point each time you download a program or any
> update including a Microsoft update.
> -Vista will use up to about 10-15 per cent of disc space for restore points.
> Once it runs out of that space it will begin to delete restore points.
> -sometimes I can't go back further than 10 days.
>
> But I am surprised that you can't restore your system to a place before your
> last restore in order to undo the damage that the last restore did. I never
> had that problem. Do you think that you may have "harmed" some Vista OS files?
>
> Also: Last night I bought Acronis True Inage Home Backup 10. Today, I backed
> up my entire drive since it is running smoothly now. I'm going to use Acronis
> as my last resort System Restore. It took less than 35 minutes to back up my
> hard drive's OS and documents. (I have less than 15 GB of data and documents
> on my drive.)
>
>
> oscar
> -
>
> "Marco Desloovere" wrote:
>
>
>> David [Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:49:05 -0700] wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I'm so used to my XP PC's holding more than a month's worth of restore
>>> points, I was shocked to see less than a week's worth on Vista.
>>>
>> The oldest restore point in my Vista is dated July 17th 2007.
>> Are you sure you displayed *all* the restore points available?
>>
>> Marco
>>
>>
I ran sfc too but it couldn't repair any files., at the end it
complained it couldnt fix some files it found were bad. great
utilities, Vista has.

and YES I looked for the "older than 5 days" option--but there was only
1 screenful of restore points this time, unlike in the recent past when
restore points overflowed to the "older than 5 days" screen.

running auslogics defrag, and installing programs over and over eats
into the number of available days to restore to, on a 250GB drive.

Dave

David [Sun, 09 Sep 2007 18:26:33 -0700] wrote:

>and YES I looked for the "older than 5 days" option--but there was only
>1 screenful of restore points this time, unlike in the recent past when
>restore points overflowed to the "older than 5 days" screen.

So how many restore points are there now and what is the date of the
oldest restore point available?

Marco