system restore in windows xp pro

[M4LMiniMe]

is it wise to get rid of system restore? looking to decide weather to kill it or not to kill it.

 

[spyordie007]

Generally I would reccomend that if you have the hard disk space to use it than you leave it enabled. Even if you dont think you need it now it could come in handy some day if you ever have one of those "wow I wish I hadnt done that" moments. Generally it uses a pretty mimimal amount of resources.

-Erik

 

[pip22]

I beg to differ. It gives you a false sense of security because it cannot be relied upon to work every time.
That alone is reason enough to disable it (as I have). Moreover, If you get a virus, it may get 'trapped' in a restore point, just waiting to be restored. Not everyone remembers to delete all their restore points after a virus clean-up. I use a disk-imaging application (Acronis True Image). make sure your system is clean of all known nasties before making the image - make fresh images every once in a while if you like.
keep an image of a fresh Windows install and put it on a CD together with a True Image bootable CD.
When you want to start afresh and clear out all the junk, use those CDs. Quicker than having to install from the Windows CD.
Works every time for me.

 

[imported_ryaneverett]

Originally posted by: pip22
I beg to differ. It gives you a false sense of security because it cannot be relied upon to work every time.
That alone is reason enough to disable it (as I have). Moreover, If you get a virus, it may get 'trapped' in a restore point, just waiting to be restored. Not everyone remembers to delete all their restore points after a virus clean-up. I use a disk-imaging application (Acronis True Image). make sure your system is clean of all known nasties before making the image - make fresh images every once in a while if you like.
keep an image of a fresh Windows install and put it on a CD together with a True Image bootable CD.
When you want to start afresh and clear out all the junk, use those CDs. Quicker than having to install from the Windows CD.
Works every time for me.

Good responce. If you sue Restore, you risk perpetuating the issues that caused you failure in the first place. Grab Ghost or something similar and have it run as a scheduled task to back up your system to a seperate drive every so often. That's saved my butt many times.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: pip22
I beg to differ. It gives you a false sense of security because it cannot be relied upon to work every time.
That alone is reason enough to disable it (as I have). Moreover, If you get a virus, it may get 'trapped' in a restore point, just waiting to be restored. Not everyone remembers to delete all their restore points after a virus clean-up. I use a disk-imaging application (Acronis True Image). make sure your system is clean of all known nasties before making the image - make fresh images every once in a while if you like.
keep an image of a fresh Windows install and put it on a CD together with a True Image bootable CD.
When you want to start afresh and clear out all the junk, use those CDs. Quicker than having to install from the Windows CD.
Works every time for me.

Without System Restore, though, you never have the backed up registries that you get with the SR feature. That alone is reason enough to use it, even if you ignore everything else and all the other beneficial features, like easily being able to roll back after a bad driver update.

No manual deleting of files is required - just disable SR after a virus infection, and then immediately turn it back on - very easy.

 

[spyordie007]

I beg to differ. It gives you a false sense of security because it cannot be relied upon to work every time.

Maybe because you're assuming it will keep personal data? System restore does a good job of keeping track of system changes; but it doesnt (and isnt designed to) keep track of your files.

Moreover, If you get a virus, it may get 'trapped' in a restore point, just waiting to be restored. Not everyone remembers to delete all their restore points after a virus clean-up.

So long as you're running a real-time scanner you should be okay. The only time the sytem restore files would be accessed anyways is if you do a restore (and in that case you'd be just as bad off as if you grabbed a drive image).

I agree that system restore is not a magical "cure all"; but it still can be very usefull if you know that it is designed to recover the system and isnt designed to recover your data (files).

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: dclive
Without System Restore, though, you never have the backed up registries that you get with the SR feature. That alone is reason enough to use it, even if you ignore everything else and all the other beneficial features, like easily being able to roll back after a bad driver update.

A disk-imaging tool is still superior in those cases as well. As long as you have a recent backup, you can always extract just the registry hives. In fact I had to do just that after W2K glitched my SYSTEM hive a few months back, first time in several years that it happened. (It might have been due to user-error in that case too.)

The benefit of SR is purely in terms of being less administrative hassle, since it's enabled by default, and automatically performs the backup. To do the same with an imaging product would require explicit configuration changes. The downside is less effective protection.

Originally posted by: dclive
No manual deleting of files is required - just disable SR after a virus infection, and then immediately turn it back on - very easy.

Does disabling/enabled SR automatically delete all prior archived restore points? I always disable it right off the bat during an installation, so I've never observed how it behaves after being enabled for some time. I know that it can eat up quite a bit of disk space though, one further disadvantage to the automatic System Restore backup process.

Originally posted by: spyordie007
Maybe because you're assuming it will keep personal data? System restore does a good job of keeping track of system changes; but it doesnt (and isnt designed to) keep track of your files.

Ironically, I've actually heard horror-stories of rolling back to prior restore points, and having personal data deleted irrevocably. Something about System Restore only ignoring user data files in certain folders, like My Documents, and tracking everything else. Did they fix that yet in recent versions of XP?

Originally posted by: spyordie007
I agree that system restore is not a magical "cure all"; but it still can be very usefull if you know that it is designed to recover the system and isnt designed to recover your data (files).

Which is also exactly why someone shouldn't rely upon "System Restore" instead of image backup, at least to protect their user data in the case of malicious damage due to malware/virus.

PS. I would like to suggest to MS, that they implement a "mini-system-backup/restore" facility, that *only* keeps track of registry/config information, much like Win98/98se's automatic registry backup facility. That would be far more valuable, and far less irritating, and use far less disk space, than the current implementation. "System Restore Lite", in other words.

 

[pip22]

Well this argument could run forever. I still maintain that once you have learned how to use an image-creation backup program (and store the image on a removable disc), that's far superior to Windows SR
whose restore points reside on the system disk and risk corruption (that's when Windows tells you it didn't work). And most imaging programs (mine anyway) allow you to delve inside the image to extract files when you don't need to do a full restore.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: pip22
Well this argument could run forever. I still maintain that once you have learned how to use an image-creation backup program (and store the image on a removable disc), that's far superior to Windows SR
whose restore points reside on the system disk and risk corruption (that's when Windows tells you it didn't work). And most imaging programs (mine anyway) allow you to delve inside the image to extract files when you don't need to do a full restore.

In many ways it is better - I use Ghost too - but it's more complicated and more difficult for the vast majority of fairly non-technical users. SR works, it's easy, and it's reliable.