more on restore

The more I look at this restore stuff the more confused I get.

What version of 7 do you have? I have 7 pro.

When turning on and off restore points for a drive, configure contains an option that was not there for xp.
Can select
restore system settings and previous of files
only restore previous versions of files
turn off system protection

Not sure what files it is referring to and not sure why you would ever want to use
"only restore previous versions of files" instead of system settings and files

Do not know what gets backed up for files and what gets backed up for settings.

Was doing some reading and found something I definitely did not know.
It said for win 7, you could use restore to restore individual files
at least for pro and ultimate -not sure about others.
It said something about Shadow Copy

After creating a restore point - containing a given drive.
If you then change a file, you can right click on it and select: restore previous versions
and you can restore the file to what it was when the restore point was created.
I did a brief test and then seemed even to work on a .txt file contained in one of my data partitions. hmmmmm
Really did not know you could do that.

But now that makes me wonder ,what would have happened if I had none a restore to a prior point. Would that have updated my data file. Or do those files only get restored if you individually click on one and chose restore previous versions.
If restore is now restoring data that could be a problem some time.

I do not want to play with this too much and maybe mess stuff up.

I am just curious. If you know anything about this, if not that is ok. Just stumbled across this and am just curious .

Fay

Repa,

I do not keep my files in MyDocuments either. But when I have the time and energy, if I ever do have the energy, I may set up a test and see what happens to those files when I do a restore.

Thanks,
Fay

Fay, I've been having trouble on my Compaq with system restore - restore points were disappearing, and new ones manually created disappeared within a few hours. Also was having trouble with staying connected at times - especially when I first booted up. So decided to try the following command on a command line:

sfc /scannow

A number of system files were found to be corrupted, including system restore files, and were replaced. Everything seems to be working fine now. You might want to give that a try to see what it does for your system restore operation.

I added 2 new tuts to the Tutorial forum. Check the lastest one out. It's really improved the performance of every machine I've done it on so far, and got me a lot of my C partition back on each machine as well. On one computer I was down to less than 3GB free space, and now back up to 10GB and still running compact on it. It's a 27GB partition on my old 2002 Dell desktop.

Repa,

I think I did the  scannow - the other day when I was having trouble.  It did report it fixed some things  but did not mean much to me.  I  have not tried the restore again.  With the IP settings you gave me, everything has been working great.

I will come back and look at the tutorials in a couple of days or so.  I got cold feet about  continuing to use the XP as a backup computer.  I talked to my pastor and am going to take it up to the church and he will put where someone can get it if they want.  I explained to him that people might not want to use it online but could use for things like  word processing, picture editing etc .  It has open office and gimp installed on it.
Anyway, I have been cleaning it a bit better ,and going thru the registry etc.  getting rid of stuff.

Also I ordered a Acer notebook with win 7. Wanted to get one with 7 while I could. It came today and have been trying to get it all set up.
When I get that all done ,I will come back and look at the new tutorials. And may try the scannow again.

Thanks
Fay

Fay, I had the same problem with restore points disappearing on my Acer laptop today. I ran sfc /scannow on it and found no problems. I then checked Volume Shadow Copy service and found that even though it was set to automatic, the service was stopped. I started the service. System Restore will not work properly if Volume Shadow Copy service is not running. I checked the Recovery tab on the Properties display (right-click or double-click on Volume Shadow Copy) and found that the settings for the first, second, and subsequence failures was "Take no Action." I changed the first and second failure options to "Restart the Service." I'll monitor this for a few days and see if that takes care of the problem.  I'm also going to recheck my Compaq and see what those settings are on it. I hadn't seen any problems with System Restore on the Compaq today.

Repa,

Have not checked on the other things yet, but went and took a look at the services.  

On both this desktop and my new laptop, the service is set to manual and is stopped.  All 3 actions on both computers are set to  "take no action".

Kind of surprised it would be set that way on my new computer.  How many people would know they need  to change this?


I was not sure if it should be set to manual and started or to automatic.

In doing  some research,  I found a command to run from and elevated command prompt.
vssadmin list shadows


I found this but I do not think it applies to 7.  
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc734254(v=ws.10).aspx

Doesn't look like the create function is there for the vssadmin command.
S0 I created a restore point

Then when I looked at services it shows started - and Manual.
I listed the shadow copies and it shows it created one.

I waited a while and checked the services again and it was stopped again.

SO,  I am wondering if one of the other services mentioned in the link above is starting and stopping even with it set to manual.

I am a bit confused right now.

Fay

Yea, me too - don't feel like the Lone Ranger. It seems there are a lot of people out there having problems with System Restore in Windows 7 not creating automatic restore points, losing restore points, failing to restore to an earlier time, etc., and none of it is very clear as to a final and permanent solution. I noticed the same things today on my computer that you stated in your post above - VSS was stopped even after what I did, but my restore points that I created were still there this time. So, the service may start and stop itself based on whether it is needed by another service or not. The settings you found seem to be the default settings as that's what they were on my Win 7 computers too. I read somewhere to change manual to automatic, and decided on my own to set it to restart after a failure, hoping that would take care of it if that is what the problem was. I also checked the Event Viewer and couldn't find anything helpful there. Now, I don't know - have to do more research I guess, although this isn't the first time I've delved into this problem. If I run across anything that makes sense and seems to work, I'll post back here and let you know.

I have not idea is this is true or not but in  a search I found this link:
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-19411_102-399058/why-are-my-windows-system-restore-points-disappearing/


One of the posts says

Quote :

If you use a registry cleaner, like the very popular CCleaner, you may be corrupting your registry in the eyes of your SR application. SR takes snapshots of the registry as is, and if you clean up your registry with CCleaner, the SR save points taken before the registry cleaning may not work. Some people like to clean up new installments by running CCleaner just after installing a program, but if the installation doesn't work and they want to SR their system, they may find that they can't. Only run CCleaner when you're confident your system is stable.

I hadn't thought about this - if true, it would be good to do a manual restore point after using the registry cleaner in ccleaner, which I will do from now on.

Also found this link
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010807/solve-the-mystery-of-lost-system-restore-points.html

It has this statement

Quote :

Sure enough, there's a body of anecdotal evidence suggesting that third-party defrag utilities can erase Windows System Restore saves

Yes, I was suspecting this myself as I noticed my restore points disappeared after running auslogics disk defrag on 3 of my 4 computers - the 2 windows 7 laptops and the windows xp laptop. I wasn't going to say anything until I did this a few more times with the same results. It doesn't always seem to happen, and I hadn't seen this before until I set the optimization option to move system files to the beginning of the hard drive. I'm going to check the auslogics forums for evidence of this and if I can contact auslogics, will ask them about it. I don't remember seeing this happen on earlier versions of auslogics disk defrag (I downloaded and ran the latest version), but then I didn't know about that optimization setting until recently either (see Tut#36).


I quit looking, seems there are a number of that can cause then to disappear.  My problem really was not that. I would select a point.  It would run, say it was working ,but  when it was finished it would  say it could not  do it.

I had that problem in the distant past on Win XP and solved it by reinstalling System Restore. Here's how:

http://www.ehow.com/how_5458598_repair-windows-xp-system-restore.html

I haven't found how to do that yet in Windows 7. SR.inf is not in Windows 7, or at least Search can't find it. If I can find out what to do, I'll let you know, as I want to know how to do this without having to repair/reinstall Windows 7.

A

Repa,

Let me know what you find out on these issues.


Would having my hard drive partition into several partitions have any effect on the optimization.
I have a large hard drive - my C partition is 390 G and 315G of it is free.

I probably will not do the optimization right now - at leas t not till I hear back from you on what you.

Also interested in what you find out about the registry cleaner option of CCLEANER and the effect on system restore.

Fay

No, partitioning your hard drive should not affect performance.

You can go ahead and use Auslogics Disk Defrag without fear. In the following link are specific instructions for how to safely deftag and optimize your hard drive. Trick 3 addresses the issue about the restore points and solves that issue with a simple selection of a setting. Here's the link to the instructions:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/how-to-defrag/

When that issue with the restore points surfaced on my computers, I was only using 2 of the options available on that settings panel - (1) Delete temporary files before deftagging, and (2) Move system files to the beginning of the disk. I did not have "Defragment in VSS-compatible mode" selected. Selecting this option, according to Auslogics, "prevents excessive growth of the VSS storage area and ensures that your system restore points will remain intact." Since I started using this option, I have not had the problem in tests that I ran. I have also selected "Skip fragments larger than 10MB" as Auslogics claims that defragging fragments that large does not have an effect on performance. I have been using this defragger for years and have complete confidence in it. I had not set the option to "Move system files to the front of the disk" until recently, and that's when I noticed that huge increase in performance, but also that restore points apparently disappeared after the run. Since I checked "Defragment in VSS-compatible mode", I haven't had a problem with the restore points.  

As far a ccleaner goes, it will only delete selected restore points at your instruction (Tools > System restore). I have never seen restore points removed when the cleaner or registry options are used. You can always use regedit to export a restore file to your desktop if you are concerned about using ccleaner registry cleaner option, or have ccleaner "fix selected issues" exercise the option to create a restore file for the registry values you are going to remove. Piriform does mention that "ccleaner removes references to the System Restore points, but may not actually remove all files related to each point." So, I would think that, in order to be sure that it doesn't affect the valid restore point files themselves,  one could look for and uncheck references to those files to prevent the references from being deleted before proceeding with the registry clean.

I realize that there are complaints about ccleaner removing restore points and I've read them, but there are reviews that also refute this. My experience with ccleaner, and I've been using it for 7 years, is that it is save to use for both file cleanup and registry cleanup. System restore in Windows 7 only creates automatic restore points once every 7 days, so it seems prudent to manually create restore points more often.

When system restore fails in a restore operation, there are 2 possibilities: 1) the System Volume Information or system restore folder has been corrupted; or, 2) the information relating to system restore in your Windows Registry has been corrupted.

The solution to the first 1) is to disable system restore on your volume(s), reboot, and then enable system restore on the volume(s), reboot, and then create a manual restore point.

The solution to the second 2) in XP was to disable system restore and then locate the SR.INF file and right-click it. Scroll through the right-click menu and click "Install" to get an uncorrupted system restore application. Unfortunately, sr.inf does not exist on Windows 7, and I cannot find an equivalent solution in Windows 7 - still looking, searches so far reveal nothing.

One thing to check before doing the above is if the restore operation fails when executed in Normal Mode, than try doing it from Safe Mode. I've experienced the same thing as you and found the restore worked from Safe Mode when it did not in Normal Mode. If it does, then I don't think that anything is wrong with Safe Mode or the Volume Information folder, but I don't know why Normal Mode didn't work and Safe Mode did.

Repa,

Thanks for this information.

One thing I do not understand: when you partition a hard drive, how are the partitions laid out?- in concentric circles are in wedges (If hat makes any sense). Are the partitions positioned such that system files can be moved to the front of the disk - maybe this is a dumb question 0 of does it just move it to the front of the partition.

Yeah , most things have varying opinions on. Even reading reviews on things is frustrating - cause will read some that will say it is the best thing ever , then right after that some that say - it is the worst thing ever - had to figure it all out sometime.

When I get thru with the things I am working on now, I may come back and see about the Auslogics defragmenter. Only a very small portion of all my partitions so I may not see the increase you do.

Thanks again.
Fay

Not being a hardware guy, I hesitate to answer this definitively, but here is an article explaining the layout of a hard drive:

http://www.ntfs.com/hard-disk-basics.htm

My understanding of moving the system files is to position them all at the beginning of the system (C: partition) so that the head does not have to travel back and forth across the partition to find those files or fragments of the files (the reason for defragging). In other words, it cuts down the search time. It has nothing to do with the size of the hard drive or the size of the partitions. When I defragged my hard drive in the past, I didn't notice any change in performance. But recently, when I discovered this capability in Auslogics and gave it a try, the difference in performance (how quickly applications loaded and executed) was quite remarkable! I'm sure if you give it a try, you will be pleasantly surprised how much faster your computer runs and you won't have any problems with restore points if you choose the settings I talked about earlier. I've used auslogics and ccleaner for 7 years and neither have ever messed up my system. I have complete confidence in using them and will continue to do so unless I find something better in the future.

Repa wrote:

Since I checked "Defragment in VSS-compatible mode", I haven't had a problem with the restore points.  

Well, I spoke too soon in my earlier post, but never fear, I found a solution to prevent this! Yea! A little while ago, I ran the auslogics defrag set up as mentioned previously, and lo and behold my restore points from before the run were gone, and an automatic restore point had been created. Darn!

So I checked the settings again in Auslogics (Settings > Program settings >Algorithms) and everything was checked. But then, I noticed there is an "Exclude" tab on that window and so clicked on that tab to see what it does. There, you can specify folders and files to exclude from defragging and so on my Compaq laptop, System Restore is located at C:\System Volume Information\System Restore\ and on my Acer laptop, the restore points are in C:\System Volume Information\. Don't know why the difference in the 2 computers, both are Windows 7 Home Premium, but that's the way I found things. So that is what I did on each system respectively, excluded those folders, ran auslogics disk defrag (optimized option) and that seems to have taken care of the problem of restore points being deleted.   

Glad you got it figure out. I will give it a try later.
Thanks for sharing this information.

Fay