Why I use System Restore

Till a few weeks ago, I had no idea what system restore did. The name is indicative, so I guessed it had something to do with restoring my system – whatever that meant. Restore from what or to what ? I didn’t have the vaguest clue.

I’ve managed to get by without using system restore for over 10 years. So I figured It wasn’t that important. But with my new fascination for tinkering with my PC, I discovered its value. The other day, I was fooling around with my User id, creating new users, conferring administrator privileges, taking it away, deleting users and generally playing God or someone from SysAdmin when I suddenly discovered that I had deleted my main user account. The desktop I had been familiar with for the last two years vanished and I couldn’t find any of my files and folders.

Panic.

I frantically went onto the net to find out how to recover files. I read with increasing dismay about file recovery programs which partially restored files - expensive software applications which sounded complicated.

That’s when, on a hunch, I decided to try System Restore.

Well, it worked.

My files,folders and my Desktop settings are back – and I haven’t lost anything (Or so I hope). I’ve become a fan of System Restore and have been trying to figure out its ins and outs.

This is some of the stuff I picked up. There’s actually quite a lot of information on System Restore, but I couldn’t understand a lot of it. So I included features I’ve understood and been able to execute – and I guess this would be useful to anyone who is, like me, not very tech oriented.

What does System Restore do ?
It restores your PC to the settings, files and folders of an earlier date and time. Not all settings, files and folders revert to an earlier date. It restores application and system files. Your latest saved data files in Word, Excel etc will be restored intact . If you’re curious about what kind of file extensions are restored check out the Microsoft Monitored File Extensions page for a list of such files. I know all this is important, but to me, it sounds like gobbledegook and Greek tossed up in a blender.

Another useful site on System Restore and general Windows tips is Bert Kinney’s Windows tech tips site.

In Windows XP (Pro), automatic restore points are created every now and then. From Microsoft’s support page, it informs me that Restore Points are created every 24 hours if the PC is used every day. The last restore point on my PC is over 10 days old. So I’m not sure about this. But I’ve also been tinkering around creating new Scheduled Tasks on my system, so I don’t know whether this has affected the creation of automatic restore points.

In any case I decided to use System Restore to create a restore point every day. It works like this :

Click Start – Programs – Accessories – System Tools – System Restore – Create a restore point

Click Next and type in the name of the restore point – for eg : Sept6th10.30am

Click on Create and the Restore point is created.

You can also use this feature to go back to an earlier restore point in your system. This is useful if your system has become unstable. System restore displays a calendar with dates in bold where restore points have been created in the past.

If you are planning to make changes in your system settings or installing new hardware and software, this is a useful utility to have around. In addition to creating restore points on a regular basis, this feature also kicks into action automatically every time you do something major on your system like installing new drivers, applications and so on.

Creating a Restore Point manually every day is a pain. So I decided to use the Scheduled Tasks feature to set up an automatic restore point every day.

I discovered that for this to work the PC must be on. Sounds obvious in hindsight, but I had imagined that at the Scheduled time every day, my PC would, like magic, start up and create a restore point. It doesn’t. Your PC has to be on, you have to be logged in to your admin user account and the PC apparently has to be in idle mode.

If I’m working on my PC at the time the System Restore action is set, a System Restore Window pops up and I have to manually create a restore point. It’s a distraction and I invariably end up closing the window and postponing the System Restore action to the next day.

I was wondering whether there was any way I could automatically create a restore point without being in idle mode or having to do it manually. And then I came across a neat little application that automatically creates a restore point every time I start up without any manual intervention.

Its called SysRestorePoint available at http://www.dougknox.com/ and originally created by Bill James. The application automatically sets up a restore point every time I start up my PC. It also displays a Window during start up telling me that the restore point has been created successfully. This is an easy tool to install. You need to download the application, store it in your hard drive and create a shortcut of the exe file to your Startup folder. The site gives a fairly easy to understand instructuion on how to install, so ti shouldn’t be a problem even for non techies. Incidentally, this app works on XP and Vista. Does not work on earlier versions.

So I now have a safety net set up. If something goes wrong, I have a restore point that is updated to a very recent setting.

Halleluiah.