Why do people not have any System Restore points

antharr said:

. Not only that but I can't count the times it has failed while trying to restore someones system for them..

Before using ISR app I used System Restore quite a bit. I always had the opposite affect. It never failed to restore. I said that to say this, If I weren't using ISR, I would be using System Restore for sure!

antharr said:

whs said:

It will require a whole long campaign to educate people about the merits of proper preperations for worst case. And that includes

Seperate data partition
Restore point
System imaging
Data backup

I am always stunned how little people know about those concepts let alone using them. But usually they learn the hard way - after a reinstallation and loss of their data.

Seperate data partition = check
Restore points = nope
System imaging = check......this is my system restore
Data backup = check

3 outta 4 ain't bad

Interesting that you do not use shadows. I do them on all my data partitions and data disks (of which I use 6) because it is an additional resource to retrieve lost data with Shadow Explorer. I do, however, not write shadows for the system partitions which are imaged automatically each morning on boot-up.

I also backup all my data on an external hard drive as well.

And on those external harddrives, I would enable the shadows (for the reasons above). Data shadows are a lot smaller than system shadows and the external drives are massive these days anyhow. So a few GBs less make no difference.

pparks1 said:

Lots of people believe they don't "need" the "handholding" provided by restore points and they read that they "Slow down the system and create unnecessary" overhead so they turn them off to tweak the most from their machine. Although using them is rare, I find them to be extremely valuable and believe they serve a great purpose. They have always been there for me on my machines.

Y'know what... In all my years with XP and now Win7, I don't think I've ever used system restore... So in Win7 I turned it off (Disabled the service, actually).

I'm with antharr, CommonTater,etc.

System Restore just isn't a viable solution for me and as such is disabled. (The first time I test drove SR on XP it failed so I would never depend on it And what good is a back up/restore solution if you can't depend on it??)

I make good use of partitions and separate all my data from the OS. All the data is backed up regularly to externals and DVD. I image the OS partition with Macrium -- and the image creation takes about 1 1/2 minutes. The resulting images are copied to an external and occasionally burned to a DVD. To restore I have a dedicated thumb drive that I boot Macrium from -- the restore process is equally lickety-split.

Fast, simple and 100% dependable.

I don't think it's of any loss to those whose computers fail to create system restore points automatically for them. I've used system restore a few times when my computer started locking up for no reason, or when some installation failed, or other problems I can't fix manually. Everytime though, system restore manage to restore the computer to a state free from those unexplained problem, but it ends up giving me a system that has various other problem because it doesn't exactly restore the computer to how it was on the system restore time. It leaves back alot of traces because it attempts not to delete user files and whatnot. In the end, I'm forced to reinstall Windows and all my programs from scratch.

As to the original question of why some installations of Windows 7 don't automatically create system restore. The answer is Windows is built by a team made up of brilliant visionaries and sharp marketeers but lazy programmers.