What's the default setting for system restore on Win10?

[mikeymikec]

I've just clean installed a machine with Win10 anniversary, and found that system protection was disabled, which surprised me somewhat (I haven't checked this setting on any other Win10 builds I've done). Can someone let me know what the default drive usage setting should be set to (percent / disk space)?

 

[Puffnstuff]

My desktop is at 4% by default with a total allocated space of 2gb and my boot drive is a Samsung 850pro 256gb. I haven't checked my other pc's so I can't tell you if they are set to the same percentage but I've never encountered a 10 install with SR disabled.

 

[nerp]

It's normally enabled. Did you install a drive manufacturer tool like Samsung Magician? They often disable it in the misguided effort to "reduce writes"

I personally disable it because I've never used it in more than a decade and I have cloud and local NAS backup. Plus, a fresh install on my hardware with an NVMe SSD, etc, takes 10 minutes tops. Installing apps and absorbing all my user settings takes another 5, tops.

Never imagined speed like this or having a 100mb line in my house. But here we are.

 

[mikeymikec]

It's normally enabled. Did you install a drive manufacturer tool like Samsung Magician? They often disable it in the misguided effort to "reduce writes"

No, though it is a Samsung SSD (128GB 850 PRO). It would be interesting if other people have seen similar behaviour on <=128GB SSDs, perhaps. I wish I wasn't installing anniversary edition but my boot DVD died recently (for 10586) and I had to use the media creation tool to make another (I had tried to back up the 10586 DVD previously but WinImage never liked it for some reason).

The machine in question is a Win8-era Lenovo Intel desktop, so it didn't need anything in the way of drivers (everything from WU), though I ended up tracking down a working version of RST for the chipset, not the easiest of tasks.

What's system restore's limit set to on Win10 on your PC?

 

[nerp]

Now I'm wondering if Windows turns it off for system driver with lower capacity like 128gb. Might make sense considering it could use a good percentage of its space with restore points. Worth looking into.

 

[mikeymikec]

Now I'm wondering if Windows turns it off for system driver with lower capacity like 128gb. Might make sense considering it could use a good percentage of its space with restore points. Worth looking into.

If this was the logic that MS are employing, it's kinda bizarre, because Windows by default says "if the space is available, I'll have x% for system restore". If the space isn't available, restore points are deleted. If it is available, old restore points are replaced with new ones.

After enabling system restore and manually creating a restore point, Windows reports that a grand total of ~100MB is being used by SR.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I remember doing a fresh install of Vista x64 on a machine with 8GB of DDR2, and a 60GB SSD for the OS drive. After doing the reboots for driver installs, etc., and having the client use it for a week, System Restore ate pretty-much the whole of the SSD. (The OS install proper was like 10-14GB.)

 

[tidy]

.

 

[bruceb]

Here's a tip of how to get to Safe Mode on Windows 10 (from another site, don't recall which one)

Boot into Windows 10 Safe Mode using the F8 key

If you miss being able to get into Windows 7 Safe Mode selections by tapping the F8 key
during startup here's how to do it in Windows 10.
To speed up the boot process, Windows 10 has F8 Safe Mode disabled. You can sacrifice
a couple of seconds during startup by enabling the F8 menu using the Command Prompt.

Right-click the Start menu and select Command Prompt (you must select run as Admin).
Select Yes in the User Account Control dialogue, if it appears.

Type (or copy/paste) the following command:

bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy

And press Enter.

 

[mikeymikec]

I could have sworn there was a second thread (possibly created by me) about this which I considered to be the more definitive one, but this is the one I've found so here it goes.

I've just done a clean install of Win10 1607 on a 256GB SSD and system restore was disabled by default, though I'm fairly sure that I've done in the same with other machines with the same model of 256GB SSD and it was enabled by default. I've also done one or two HDD installs of 1607 which had SR enabled by default.

 

[RLGL]

In build 15063 system restore was turned off. If I remember I will check this after the next build is released