Any way to see what files are included in a SR point?

[Ztruker]

Is there any way to examine a System Restore point to see what files and folders are included? Seems like this could be handy as well as answer questions about what is included in a SR point.

 

[not so gray matter]

This might be of help, certainly expanded my understanding of the feature:

What Exactly Does System Restore Back Up? - PCWorld

In other words it'll back up your system files no problem, will back up certain application files but not all, and will leave your documents alone.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Sure, there's a way. Open up System Restore, and begin the restore process. When it comes time to select a restore point, select "Scan for affected Programs" at the bottom.

 

[Ztruker]

No, that just shows you what programs were installed after the restore point was taken or what may be rolled back. Does not present any kind of list of files and folders.



Are there any MS tech docs that describe System Restore as far as how a restore point is written to the hard drive and what the structure of each file is? With that it should be fairly straight forward to write a script to scan it and provide details.

 

[whs]

Run Shadow Explorer. That will show you every file in every restore point (shadow) you choose. You can even recover any file/folder by a right click on it and Export. Here is a detailed video tutorial I made that will explain it: http://www.vimeo.com/3236026

 

[Ztruker]

Thank you. Seems I had downloaded that on March 3rd but never used it so I forgot about it. Just installed and ran it and it's quite impressive. Acts just like Windows Explorer. I could navigate right down to the bookmarks.html file in my SeaMonkey (web browser) profile.

I didn't realize that Shadow Copy was a full drive backup. Seems like that could use up a lot of space. Is there any way to see how much space each shadow occupies? Time to read more about it.

 

[whs]

What you can do is run the following command in an elevated Command Prompt:

Vssadmin list shadowstorage

From there you pick up the used number for C. Then you check with Shadow Explorer how many shadows you have and divide the used number by the number off shadows. That gives you an approximate idea of their size.
My experience is that the shadows are 250MB to 1GB depending on the size of your C. On partitions/disks with data only, they are a lot smaller.

 

[Ztruker]

Hmmm, mine has 7 restore points occupying 1.97GB, so that's 291MB per (I have C: set for 3% of the drive).

That can't possible be the entire C: partition, it 80GB and has about 44GB free.

So, what exactly does get saved? Is there a list anywhere?

 

[whs]

Thats about right. You can check with Shadow Explorer what's being saved.