System Restore Points Saved for Only One Month?

[orphanedhanyou]

hi all,

months and months ago i had to do a system restore and found that there was only one restore point - the original date i got it (even though i had my computer for a while before that).

not sure if i noticed the 'show more restore points' check box.

i recently decided to look into this and have been wondering why 7 wasnt making more of them, but i looked again today and checked the more box and there were more - but only this past month.

does 7 delete restore points after one month?

 

[funinfo]

for me i restore my system seven or 8 bey acronis true image

 

[LMiller7]

Windows 7 deletes older restore points, as it must. How long it keeps them depends on a variety of factors. The further back you go with system restore the more likely that it will fail or cause more problems than it solves. I would not want to use a restore point anywhere near a month old. On the few occasions I have used system restore it has always been the most recent restore point.

 

[orphanedhanyou]

I just could have sworn Vista and XP kept all of them and never automatically deleted them, I remember there being a lot more...

Thanks for responding though!

 

[whs]

Each restore point takes +/1GB of disk space (shadowstorage). The number of restore points that are being kept depends on the size of your shadowstorage. You can check that with this command:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

The 'Maximum' is all you have. But that can be increased - or decreased.

It is not a question of time when they are deleted (space reused) but depends on the installation activity. Every time you install a program or an update (applies to most updates), the system will create a restore point. It also will create one once per week (used to be one per day in Vista).

The mechanism was the same in XP and Vista.

 

[LMiller7]

If older restore points were not automatically deleted and space for them was not restricted they would eventually fill the hard drive. With the small hard drives in common use when XP was released that could happen in a matter of months. Automatic deletion of older restore points is essential. I know from experience that this did take place in XP.

System restore was designed as a means of restoring the system back to a recent date. For longer term you need an image backup, but preferably updated on a regular basis.

 

[glassofwater]

Restore points are saved until the disk space System Restore reserves is filled up. As new restore points are created, old ones are deleted. If you turn off system protection (the feature that creates restore points) on a disk, all restore points are deleted from that disk. When you turn system protection back on, new restore points are created.

 

[Callender]

System Restore - deletion on old restore points

Hi,

The number of days that restore points are kept before being automatically deleted is the value stored in the registry here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore\RPSessionInterval

This value specifies, in seconds, the restore points Time to Live (TTL). When a restore point reaches this time and it is still on the system, it gets deleted. The default value is (7776000), which will be 90 days.

If you want an easy way to manage system restore you could take a look at this utility:

Manage & Customize your Windows Restore Points with System Restore Manager

I've used it on a regular basis in the past. It will allow you to specify how long system restore points are kept before deletion and also from within the user interface it will allow you to select a system restore point to return to.

There is the option to select the amount of disk space available for system restore points.

It's a good idea to make regular system image backups anyway - just in case!