System Restore: Yes or No?

That's it, since i have memory if have always disabled this feature on windows, just because i never had to use it and it would take a lot of hard drive space.... but yesterday i installed a new instance of Windows XP, disabled it and then installed IE 7, but something went wrong and XP crashed, i couldn't do anything and searching through internet i found that the only way to solve it was making use of System restore, which guess what... I HAD DISABLED JUST BEFORE!! so... had to reinstall windows again

So the qustion is: do you think System restore is worth it to get enabled, or just a waste of drive space since maybe you are not going to use it ever?

 

I have it enabled for a period of time and disable it when my system is stablized.

 

a few gigo of spare (change) disk space is worth it. i see it as an insurance, how would you know that u never need it

cheers ...

 

I believe that System Restore is a valuable function but that doesn't necessarily mean that using 12% of your HD is justified. I have mine set to half of that (6%) and it creates more than enough restore points while saving me 6 GB of HD space. A happy medium, if you will.

 

Here's what I do:

Disable on every partition except the OS partition
Making sure that the OS is running properly at that point, I disable and reenable once every few months, such that I clean up the older restore points

In that way I still have the benefits without the drawbacks

Be advised that system restore will NOT obey the maximum drive space that you set for it, at least it never did in my experience.

 

I just delete old system restore point that I know I would never use. But as far as Disabling System Restore, it's not a good idea at all.

 

System Restore is there for a purpose. If you have enough HD space it's safer to have it turned on. I create a restore point before I install a program just in case. According to my restore point it's using 16gb of HD space to do so... it's has incremental restore points available. My available HD is 60gb now and I got all the programs I wanted installed.

 

I disable mine. Never once used it in over 6 years of owning my own computers. All my personal stuff is backed up (on DVDs) regularly, so if anything really bad happened I'd just format my notebook.

 

Yeah i've never used it before but now it could have saved me a reinstall thanks to one of those unantended editions of windows with everything on it instead of downloading through the windows update, guess i'll just do what E.B.E. said, keep it on the OS partition and clean it once ever few months

 

This is exactly what I do as well. I cannot take the risk of not running system restore and then a program destabilizes windows.

 

I always disable it, not because I don't think I'll screw up, but because I don't know exactly what it does.

I don't want Windows to decide which files to revert, because that means I no longer know the state of my computer. If I revert to a restore point from 2 months ago, exactly which of the changes I've made in the last 2 months have been lost? How many dead files do I have lying around which are no longer used, because the relevant registry entries have been removed? For that matter, which parts of the registry have been reverted? How can I even know for sure that whatever problem I encountered has been fixed, when I don't know what exactly has been changed?

 

It uses 15% by default. Just go into the command prompt and resize that amount.

 

like wise with me

 

Seems like those BSOD always happen at the most inconvenient time. I'd rather have system restore active and limit its HD space than disable it. At least this gives you a chance to recover in an emergency... you can always go back and sort things out or clean up later.

 

This should not even be a question. System Restore should always be enabled. You never know when you might need it. I set my storage space for system restore to like 6GB I think.

 

Same here. I think it's helpful for small things here and there, but if anything serious comes up, I just reformat.

 

I have never had to use System Restore but I would like to know how to go into it and delete all previous restore points, since I know I will not need them at all.

 

Go to Disk Clean Up, Select All Users then hit the More options Tab on the window that opens.
You'll see system restore and shadow copies, hit clean up and there you go.

You'll probably want to create a restore point after that though since I presume it deletes all of them.

 

Thanks. That was spot on assistance. Actually the prompt says it will delete all previous restore points except the most recent, so its most desirable.

Rep point added

 

the first thing i do when i get Windows Going is to Get all updates for it and then create a restore point before i put anything personal on it. and then i disable it.

this way i have a good copy of windows i can revert to which is faster than reinstall and updating.

 

Well said! This is also one reason why I backup my stuff on DVD and would rather format my notebook than to use system restore.

 

I always disable it, especially now with Vista and Shadow Copy. Since I make regular backups of my files, I'd rather just do a clean install of the OS if something goes haywire. In fact, I had to do this just yesterday when XP suddenly became very unresponsive......

 

I do enough clean installs on one of my HDs for just experimenting and it's still a pain even though I barley add any apps or configure. I'm even sick of doing VMWare installs which is why I save a copy of my .VMX files on a external drive.

I'll be damned if I'm going to do a clean install every time I run into a problem that can't seem to be fixed. I have too many apps on my Main drive. I hate doing the initial MS updates, then configuring, installing apps, etc: etc:

It takes hours to get it back to the way it was before problem, when you can just system restore and have in handled in minutes.


And far as dead files are concerned..... It's not a big deal. Especially if you set restore to set a new point everyday or two. Most likely not much installing of programs takes place within a one/two day time period. You can easily delete folders.

 

True, especially with XP and it's myriad of hotfixes. Vista is easy at this juncture, as there are not nearly as many obstacles to slow the process down (which is why I went to Vista on my old Compaq yesterday when XP got fubared somehow).

 

I've never had to format due to something like that (something that would have been fixed by system restore). The only times I've formatted was because I wanted to start fresh (one every 2 years or so).
So so far, in 6 years or so of owning my own computer I've never had to format due to something that would have been fixed by a system restore. So I wouldn't consider it a really big deal if it happened.

 

Same as Thibault. So far, I've never really needed it. Also, I've got a XP CD slipstreamed with all the latest updates plus drivers (as of a month ago), so I don't need to download much to be up and running. (And of course I have literally nothing other than Windows on my OS partition, so formatting that isn't a big deal.

Mostly though, as I said, I just don't like not knowing the state of my computer. Which drivers do I have installed? Who knows, it might have rolled back when I used the restore point, or... it might not. Does Windows now contain an extra 3GB of uninstall data that it'll never need because the programs themselves have been rolled back?

It's a handy feature, but I feel it's mostly targeted at average/casual users, as a quick fix for people who otherwise won't know what to do. I do know what to do, so I prefer fixing my problems manually.

Anyway, if you make restore points every day or two, how does help you if the problem is something that occurred 2-3 weeks ago, but which only just surfaced? Either you have to keep *a lot* of restore points around, or you're screwed if the problem is older than a couple of days. Or what?