System Restore Points

as to the time frame for restore points, I rarely make any myself nor do I do much installations any more. Most, if not all, of the restore points are automatically made every 24 hours of up time. So, I can have only 4 or 5 points over a two week period. But now it seems it is limited to one or maybe 2 points during the current and previous day. For example the point I have now for yesterday will be gone by Monday and only points from today and tomorrow will be there.

I came up with one each day this week, from Sunday to Saturday, with the exception of Wednesday. I must not have used it on that day. I don't know how many the limit is, or if there is a limit at all. One factor may be the size of your C:\ drive partition. Mine is rather small, at only 20 GB--just big enough to have Windows and all the programs on it. Then I have the rest of the hard drive partitioned for my data. My point is that maybe it has something to do with how much space you have for the C drive. Maybe the bigger it is, the more checkpoints you will have. I think you did say that you could change it by percentage of the total partition size.

Good info from each of you.

Back to the problem. Yesterday (Saturday, 6/30) I had one restore point from Thursday (28th), 4 points from Friday (29th, I did some installations) and one from Saturday (30th). I just took a look and now I have one automatic restore point from 12:55pm today, nothing earlier, all gone.

Les, I'm going to go down your list of possibilities one by one and will let you know, although I'm not familiar with the event viewer you mentioned, I'll look into that.

Thanks again to all posters.

If you have zone alarm click HERE

Maybe deleting old restore points will help,LINK

Tom

Hello Ed,
You could have a look at this MS page about registry settings for SR in case you want to check you have the default settings as in the article
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q295659

I'll go down and check the defaults, being careful as to which ones are changeable and which ones are not.

Referring back to my post #7, I checked this morning and the one restore point from Thursday, four points from Friday and one point from Sunday are all gone. The only restore point I have now is the one from Sunday, with none yet for today. Suddenly I go from seven points to one - weird.

Just wondering Ed, as we are in a new month, you did click on the top left arrow over the July calendar in system restore to have a look at the June check points, the ones that are missing?
Do you have a lot of CPU activity in the performance tab of Task Manager and in the Processes tab in Task Manager what figure is your system idle process showing?

I don't have that many restore points myself as I have Folding at Home running most of the time, not from boot time though, I've got 4 check points in June and the same for May and half of them are when I've installed something.Some people reduce the RP Life interval TTL down to 30 days, whatever that is in seconds, as they think if the PC is OK for a month, that's good enough and maybe so.

If you can't find the June points you made I'd be wondering if some anti virus or firewall program was causing the problem, as some of them make their own system snapshots at boot time.

You don't have Scheduled Tasks running a disc clean daily with the restore points option selected do you, as that would clear check points, or do you have the Tea Timer running in Spybot?

Here's a little thing that might help to quickly create points, whether they will stay is another thing, Les.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/System-Snapshot.shtml

Don't know whether this will help Ed, blank system restore calender fix
http://dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_sysrestore_blank.htm

I ran the Calendar Fix and it showed two registry entries are not correct. I selected the repair, ran it again and it showed no registry entries needed repair. We'll see what happens. Thanks again for your many suggestions.

Hope it's all OK now Ed, I was wondering if the restore points were in your System Volume Information folder all along but were not showing in the calendar, so hopefully the calendar fix will work.
I was thinking of asking you to view the system volume information folder to see if the RP's for June were there all the time, but let's hope it's fixed now, Les.

Hi Les, this morning I had restore points for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - nothing yet today. My PC has been on all day and I just checked back and I have one automatic restore point that was set at 2:27 this afternoon. Nothing else, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday points gone. I'll just have to live with it.

One other thing, I went in and un-hid my hidden folders and checked the System Volume Information folder (C: Drive) and don't see any type of file or folder relating to SR. Am I looking for a specific folder under the C: drive?

This link explains If your drive is NTFS, the permissions on the folder are set so not even administrators can get in there

Tom

Hi there Ed, sorry to hear points going missing again, the reason I asked in previous post about ticking back to June and you finding no points there, I can't tick back to a previous month unless I have restore points for that month, just like I can't tick ahead for next month, but you could tick back to a blank month, making me think maybe points are there but not showing.

Don't know whether you've given yourself permissions like Tom explained and had a look to see if the RP's are in the SVI folder,(you should have previously unticked Hide protected operating system files as well as ticking show hidden files), when you open the SVI folder then the inner restore folder, you should see the numbered RP folders, thats RP followed by two numbers and a properties check on them will tell date of creation, I think this is an easier way than using the srdiag tool in windows/system32/restore to see if RP folders are there or not.

Other than knowing if the RP points exist it doesn't help and might be time to think of using a 3rd party restore utility like Erunt and saying goodbye to system restore, I guess you've already tried sfc /scannow and sr.inf install and don't want to do a repair install of XP just for this, Les.

I mis-spoke about going back to June to look for restore points. When I said I went back to June, the fact was I tried to go back but couldn't so I assumed there were none in the month of June.

You are right about trying other software. I will take a look at Erunt and also looking at Acronis True Image Home Edition 10. Anything will be better than what I've got now.

I appreciate all your suggestions.

I did move the SR restore point calendar back to June, and it showed no restore points there...

Ed, I was just wondering (since I was just led here because of a tracked discussion notification) why you are using System Restore in the first place. It is often unreliable, and it could lead to undesirable results. In one such case, I used it once and my drive C:\ was recovered perfectly, BUT there were several sensitive files that I had added afterwards on another partition that were erased because when System Restore works, it doesn't just restore the C:\ drive partition, but it restores EVERYTHING exactly the way it was when the checkpoint was made. When I realized that, and that it had just deleted my very important and irreplaceable sensitive files, I tried to do a backwards System Restore to get those files back, but it didn't work and they were gone forever.

I think the best thing to do is to do a backup with a good backup program. That way if all you need to do is to restore the Windows partition (because that's all that needs to be restored if there is a system failure), then that's all you need to restore. Look for a good backup program. I use Acronis True Image Home Edition 10 and it is the best that I have tried--albeit it does have some minor flaws, but so does everything else.

Bottom Line: If <I> need to restore my system, I disregard System Restore and use Acronis True Image Home Edition instead. It is more reliable.

I am looking at Acronis True Image Home Edition 10 and it seems to do just what I would want to do. It looks like it would image the entire drive, including OS and registry. I am just wondering if I could make several images at different dates, similar to SR, and select a specific date to reload. I have an 80G external drive so it would depend on the size of each image. I'll look into it a little further but it sounds good. I appreciate your suggestions and info.

If you do use an external drive for backups, I would recommend that you make a separate partition for your Acronis Backups, to protect them from being corrupted. New with version 10 is a feature to protect these partitions, but I don?t like that feature. It is good even without the special protection and I?ve never had any problems. One of the reasons I don?t like the extra protection is that it also automatically deletes your backup if it becomes ?too old? and I don?t like a program telling me how old ?too old? is.

Yes, this system would allow you to put in as many backups on the same partition as you wish. The rule, though, is that the partition you are making a backup of has to be a different partition that the backup file is going into. Each backup could be backups of all your separate partitions, and their size is relatively small. The size depends on the size of each drive and how much you have on it. When you begin your backup, you have the choice of backup media: 100 MB Zip Drive, 650 MB CDs, 700 MB CDs, DVDs, or burn directly to a partition, and with that option, you could either back it up in one single file, or break it down into Zip Drive size, CD size, or DVD size. Then, if you want to, you could use a program, like Nero, to burn each of these files onto a CD or DVD. On my 20 GB partition, which I use for just Windows and all my programs, it makes 2 DVD files and a file only as big as a CD.

I do have a lot of suggestions and info, and I HAVE written them, but it?s too long to put here. If you would like more info, then click on my profile name and once you are at my profile, click on ?E-mail this user? and I?ll send it to you.

Barry