There is this common misconception about System Restore people still have that it’s not useful and just eats drive space. I think that’s still from Windows XP days when System Restore never really worked when you needed it the most, but for the rest of the time it was just eating tons of drive space.
The first thing people do when they install Windows is to head into settings and disable it. Ok, sure, it saves you few gigabytes, but it can really save you tons of time when things go wrong. And it has worked great since Windows 8.1. Whenever I had to fix something that I broke by tweaking it too much, System Restore fixed it.
You don’t need to give it 50GB of space to work with. 10GB is plenty, hell I think sacrificing 5GB should do the trick as well. It should be enough for few latest checkpoints, meaning when something goes wrong and system refuses to load Windows, you can recover it by waiting for Windows to boot into recovery mode by itself and then going through Troubleshooting section where you can fire up System Restore and fix the issue by going “back in time” before the issue happened. Whole process takes like 5 minutes. You know how long it takes to re-install Windows, even latest Windows 10 which installs the fastest.
So, don’t be stupid and leave System Restore enabled.
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A better option is to make an image of the entire hard drive with a program such as Macrium Reflect. System Restore is fine, but it does not always work like it should. Sometimes System Restore fails to restore the operating system. With a drive image, you can extract any data you need, or restore the hard drive or SSD back to the exact condition the drive was in, before there was a problem.
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This. Other tools are more reliable anyway. Also the best solution to the above is to not tweak in the first place.
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Thanks for the tip. I’m always unsure whether I should disable System Restore because a lot of tutorials on the Web say that the extra space would just be wasted. But this should clear things up 🙂
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I think in WinXP era was like hell and pain in the ass since a lot of spyware’s and viruses used that feature to hide themselves into it, since it was a protected location! that is why most people even I as a tech programmed to disable that feature, but still I agree with you that feature is now mature and better than before with Windows 7 and up. I agree that I enable it always. Plus in WinXP era the hardware was not that good enough to handle such a feature, like these days, I admit yes it was using a significant memory and some cycles, but now it’s different and you wouldn’t feel that it is enabled any way. 😉
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