System Restore, on or off?

System Restore is actually useful though.

If you are going to write gigabytes of nothing to your ssd (which is what benchmarking is pretty much) then it might as well be to your /System Volume Information/ folder where it can be used to save your bacon the next time you break Windows.

 

I'm not using System Restore. If anything goes wrong I prefer doing a clean install, which only takes me 10 minutes anyway.

 

In any and all working systems which 'broke' where System Restore would theoretically save someone from a re-install, I have never seen it work once.

All it has caused is wasting valuable time waiting for SR to go back to a previous time point and then finding out that the system is still broken. This is even worse when trying to recover from viruses - SR is usually keeping a pristine copy of the virus that reinfects the computer instantly upon rebooting.

SR gives a false sense of security and more often than not actually makes the system even less stable/secure too.

 

My experience is the opposite. System restore has worked for me, and a few of my friends before.

 

Then I would venture to say that it was not really broken?

When an O/S becomes unstable to the point of needing to reinstall it - how can you depend on such an unstable O/S to restore itself?

Answer; you can't.

 

Ok I didn't expect a system restore debate here

I have to agree with those who don't use it since I have had it fail with a virus and a screwed up OS and had to do a reinstall anyway.

That being said I have kept system restore activated but reduced it's size to the minimum of 1% on my OS drive. This gained back ~5.5GB of space and the 1% or 1.5GB for system restore space still holds at least 3 full restore points. The two main reasons I still keep it active are: 1) By saving all my system settings (power plans, reg tweaks, custom color calibrations etc.) It really does save me a ton of time if I need to restore for something 'simple' and 2) It seems to work fine for things like a bad update of a 'Beta' ATI driver that cuase issues, it's a lot quicker than scrubbing out all the ATI driver & CCC files with driver sweeper / driver cleaner and reinstalling the previous version.... About 3-4 minutes to restore (from created restore point) compared to 25 to 30 minutes to do this manually.

 

Ok time to clear up some misunderstandings.

1) System Restore is vastly better in Windows 7 than it was in XP so if you haven't used it in a long time, don't knock it until you've tried it.

2) SSDs like most things are not designed to work forever. They are designed to last a little bit longer than a reasonable PC user's upgrade cycle which is about 3 to 5 years. So its convenient that everyone selling SSDs now is offering a 3 to 5 year warranty against failure. If you are worried go with someone that will give you a 5 year warranty.

In all liklihood you won't be using the same drive in 5 years time and even if you are, a new drive of the same capacity and comparable speed will cost next to nothing. What is more likely is that drives that retrograde won't even be available so even the cheapest replacement drive in 5 years time is likely to be superior to what you've already got, assuming it will even work in a 5 year old PC. Will all of us still be using sata connections in 5 years time? Either way, this is called planned obsolecense. You will get your money's worth out of your drive provided you use it.

All I'm saying is that if you disable System Restore, do it for a good reason. i.e. you prefer using Acronis/Ghost to make regular images of your system drive. Just don't disable it based on some crazy idea that you'll brick your ssd in months if you don't eliminate every non critical write to your system drive. For a single home user thats just nuts.

 

Actually you never said anything about it. It would take a massive inference to get from your first post to this next one. All I picked up from your original post is "the SSD is empty, fill it." Nothing about preventing wear, the robustness of Win7 System Restore, backup strategies, SSD survival, or tech evolutions.

That said, I only keep enough space for a few restore points, and they never get invoked. It's an absolute last resort for me.

 

In XP, SR was like pressing a self-destruct button. In Windows 7, SR has successfully restored my system after several incompatible Windows updates. I'd recommend it.

 

I agree but for SSD's its not viable.. it wastes already limited space which i can't afford.. i rather keep it off.. i after all have backup images which i can use..

 

I don't think my first post is the first post in this discussion. I remember typing this in another thread and it was part of a longer discussion about ssd wear and the fact that the imperative to minimize writes is blown entirely out of proportion. I'm guessing a moderator broke it off into a new thread because it was becoming increasingly irrelevant. It has now derailed into an argument over whether System Restore is useful or not. Either that or I did something stupid like clicked a post thread button instead of post reply.

I maintain that System Restore is highly useful and that you shouldn't disable it to minimize write wear. If you have a suitable alternative then by all means use it and in so doing disable System Restore if it achieves the same ends. But if you are going to disable System Restore do it for the right reason - because you have a better contingency and not because you are worried about bricking your drive which is nuts. You aren't going to kill your drive through write wear. A single home user would have to actively try to kill it by running massive benchmarks every day for like 2 years straight or running a busy always on file server or database or something out of it. Basically things that are not normal for a home user.

 

If you have a SSD installed - you can see the impacts by running manual trim (Intel Toolbox), normally the command will take a few seconds (if that). With system restore on, could take minutes to several hours. This has been discussed in the long SSD thread also.
If you have nothing for back-up, I would recommend using it. I have mine turned off and back-up images are my restore capability.

 

Yes I moved discussion about System Restore from the JJB SSD Tweak thread because it was going off topic.

 

That's nice, but you can only do that because you seem to have no software installed on your system. Now me, a clean install on my main workstation would cost me a week, full time. So I religiously keep disk images of my system. Restoring a disk image only takes me two hours. Actually, it takes the computer two hours, I can go do something else in the meantime.

System restore can be useful, however, if only because of its "Previous Versions" feature, allowing me to go back to earlier versions of files that I may have edited, or overwritten with newer versions.

 

I couldn't agree more with this. Making sacrifices in system functionality out of an irrational fear of wearing the drive out makes no sense. Why not simply turn off the computer, this way you'll not have to worry about wear at all...

 

I can agree with SR being useful as some have suggested.

However, I don't only disable SR because it is useless to me, I disable it because I want/need the maximum speed/responsiveness from my system at all times.

If I could get a SR option that allowed me to pick the restore point (and not do any others automatically until I told it to again), then, that might make me use/try it again.

Otherwise, the point of disabling SR for me (besides it's penchant for harbouring malware that no A/V can clean) is strictly for performance reasons.

 

System Restore is sort of like a multiple 'undo' feature like you get in MS Word but for your whole OS. In Windows 7 it can even roll back drivers properly.

It sounds like you should be using Acronis True Image or something and making a system image once, not set to a schedule. Backups are one of those things that are a total waste of space until you actually need them. Then if you don't have a backup you just cry.

 

Correct, very little.

 

Win 7 rolls back drivers fine with SR turned off.

I used to use Acronis, but nothing is as stable as a clean install of both O/S and programs.

Backups? You're asking a photographer about backups?

If you don't have it at least twice, you don't have it at all.

 

Unless you have practically nothing on your computer, a clean install of the system/application drive can be a huge huge pain in the errr, bum. You can appreciate how your solution is really not a solution for alot of people.

I'm guessing you don't use libraries much either because setting all of mine up again from my storage drives would take ages. I don't even want to think about having to do that actually.

 

Performance? I am not aware of any performance impact of SR.

 

I have SR off for now. I use the storage drive for system images as I have to do a Secure Errase about every two weeks or so...........

 

Aaaaand thats a bad thing if you have a Sandforce drive because excessive secure erasing defeats Duraclass. Here's what OCZ at least has to say about it.

Its great that on this forum people are so willing to give advice but you gotta qualify your statements otherwise people will get very screwy ideas about what is good for them and their computer. I'm sure you have a good reason for secure erasing every two weeks. Perhaps you are an enterprise user? Why not explain the circumstances which necessitate these measures?

Without qualification however, I can imagine some occassional student/gamer with his brand spanking new Vertex 2 finding your suggestion very persuasive so he goes away and secure erases/reinstalls every 2 weeks. Then he cues up a bunch of incompressible write benchmarks just to see that all of this effort is having an effect.

What originally started as an attempt to protect the drive from excessive write wear now has the opposite effect. Every 2 weeks hes resetting the controller, circumventing one of the key protective mechanisms of the drive and subjecting it to massive amounts of pointless writes. This is the sort of atypical usage pattern that will shorten the life your drive. Much more than allocating 1% of your boot drive for System Restore shadow copies.

If you are a Sandforce user and you are really paranoid about write wear then buy Acronis True Image, make a boot cd and then create a scheduled system image on an external hdd. Then turn off System Restore if you want nothing more to do with it. At least this way you have a backup in the event of system drive failure, you eliminate System Restore writing to the drive and you don't screw with Duraclass.

Now all you need to do is to resist the urge to hammer your ssd with massive incompressible synthetic benchmarks which apparently is what makes Duraclass cry in the first place.

 

If that is the case, use drive imaging software like Acronis True Image.

The next time you do a clean reformat, install everything you would want on a default system... drivers, applications, libraries, patches, Windows updates, settings, configurations, etc. Get your system exactly the way you like it. Then, use a drive imaging tool to take a snapshot of that machine.

If anything goes wrong with your machine whatsoever, you can easily restore it to that "clean" state in 30 minutes by using drive images to restore your hard drive. All of your settings, drivers, libraries, etc will be pre-installed. This is incredibly useful for anybody that likes to mess around with drivers, runs weird applications, is afraid of getting viruses / malware, etc. Whenever anything bad happens to your machine, simply restore it to a known good "clean" state.

 

Beat you to punch bro.

DOOF