I created a system restore point for my WinXP system back in February 2004. However, when I went to check for & possibly recall it, it was no longer there. The dates would only go as far back as approximately 3 months. Is 3 months the most the 'system restore' feature will go? Or is there a way of changing it?

It doesn't keep them forever because it only uses 12% of your HD space. You can adjust that in the system Restore properties box.

How much drive space do you have allocated to System Restore? The maximum is 12%. The restore points will remain as long as there is room for them. After that the oldest restore point is deleted to make room for the newest. System Restore is great for recovering from recent changes and mistakes but it wasn't intended to be a long term backup solution.

You should use somethng like Ghost or Drive image to image your drive for a long term backup

You should get into the habit of creating a restore point whenever you run a system cleaner or install a program etc.

By default, anything using Microsoft Installer (MSI) module should automatically create a restore point, but it's not perfect.

System Restore will restore just about everything apart from anything in My Documents, which will remain current.

If you want something better than System Restore, GoBack is excellent as it loads independently of Windows so is unaffected if Windows crashes or refuses to start.

The only thing that will negate it is a dead hard drive.

However, backing up should be done no matter which of these restore programs you use.

If you have a 120 gig hd, restore can use 14.4 gigs of it. That's a lot. Usually I pick just a small amount of hd space for restore. Then turn off Restore, restart computer, turn on restore, & create a restore point. Kinda hairy to do this but works for me.

Yeah but if, for example, you have a 120gig harddrive, and your actual data takes up ~50gig, that leaves ~70 gig of free space. What's the problem?

Until you're actually hurting for free space and really need that 14.4.gig used by System Restore why not give it what it needs? The more harddrive space available, the more restore points are automatically created and therefore the more likely that you can recover from a problem. Additionally, the larger the harddrive, the more data you're more likely to have on it, meaning the larger the restore point must be. If you aren't giving System Restore sufficient space to do it's job effectively you might as well just turn it off.


I've seen more then one person allocate too little space to System Restore then wonder why they couldn't actually recover to a functional point when the inevitable occurs.