What Does System Restore ACTUALLY Do?

Ever wonder what's really going on when you create a restore point?

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
1:24 - Enabling System Restore
2:22 - What System Restore Actually Does
4:42 - Behind The Scenes
7:52 - Don't Rely On It for Document Recovery
9:50 - In Summary

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[pyp]

Well this is going to be helpful to know, as I create system restore points when I do something that might potentially be dangerous (I would typically test somethings in a virtual machine before I do it on my main device).

[Elijah-]

System Restore saved my life more times than I have fingers and toes. A great feature especially if you are prone to install suspicious software.
Reading the comments, it appears Windows 10, and more so Windows 11 does not always restore successfully.
I'm still gloriously happy with my Windows 7, which gets the job done.

[Woodzta]

Thanks to Windows ME, I got very familiar with System Restore. Couldn't ask for a better tutorial than having to restore my OS every few weeks.

[EinChris]

The term you where searching for at 5:30 is "copy on write". The entire file system gets a time stamp put on. Each entry in the master file table gets it as well. And when you start to change a file (or even just a block in a file), that timestamp is checked. And if it's the same as the one of the file system, windows knows that this block represents the state in a VSS snapshot. Then windows duplicates the block (keeping the old in the snap shot) and creates a new one for the current file.

[LarcR]

I've learned the hard way that Windows System Restore fails more often than it succeeds. It is now turned off on all my computers. Why take up space with restore points if they aren't reliable? Instead, I make frequent Macrium Reflect backups. They have never failed me.

[CesarPeron]

One of the most underrated services of Windows ever, I would love if Linux have a feature like this. You should create a Task (Task Scheduler) to have a regular snapshot, that save me a lot to recover files, even against Ransomware. Seriously, we're talking about of one of that services that we must need to have enabled hands down.

[redcrafterlppa]

10:12 the windows registry is actually partially stored in the user directory. It is (most likely) still included by file type since .DAT files are (most likely) on the list.

[anon_y_mousse]

It's amazing how after all these years I'm still finding out about features that Windows has and yet doesn't promote the heck out of and just go under the radar. They should promote the shadow copy feature and have some security features on it. What's more, if system restore doesn't backup your user files automatically, they should add that functionality into it so your data can be safeguarded too.

[PhoenixCNSTL]

I'm actually so glad System Restore exists. I had a major problem where an application changed something, which caused my disk to malfunction and won't shut down my laptop, and System Restore solved the problem.

[_SJ]

@ 2:17 I enabled System Restore a while ago and set the Max Usage at 60% (60.00 GB). Is it advisable to set the Disk Space Usage to 100%?

[World_of_OSes]

Those clouds on your desktop wallpaper are moving.

[Klusio]

I was also wondering at some point, what the heck does that "system restore" does. Thank you Joe!

[ebaylistinginfo]

That's interesting to know. However, System Restore stopped working for me when I upgraded from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro for some reason. So, I use a hard drive clone program instead to regularly clone my entire C: drive instead.

[Bishop]

As someone working in a computer store this helped a few times when I am looking for a time saver solution but personally on my own pc nothing feels better then a fresh install of windows to remove all my experimental mistakes.

[mda]

Back with Windows 98 I installed Norton GoBack which continually marked safe points so that the entire drive could be restored to any point as required. Great for trying out stuff that made a mess of the system as you could simply go back to an earlier point in time.

[mintmag]

System shadow snapshot (also known as VSS ) is amazing technology, but "system restore" is the worst implantation of it. Imagining programs such as Macrium Reflect or Todo Backup make far better use of this technology than Sys restore.
VSS is what allows you to make a clone of your C drive while it is still in use. Further more, said clone can be mounted and even used as a virtual drive without affecting any of the data stored in it.

It can also be compressed quite drastically as well. This technology is not available on Linux.

[Renatodonadio]

0:01 System restore was introduced with Windows XP, in the introduction video was shown a kid with a plastic toy hammer hitting on the keyboard of a PC which was left on, scrambling files around out of the display case, then came the elder sister and used the new feature to repair everything 😀

[FeenickzVR]

Oh my god, I haven't seen your videos in so long, I used to watch you all the time in middle school when you still did your joke videos! Glad to see you're still uploading!

[PBSA]

System restore did help me at some points, I was deleting users directories to clear up space, and I ended up deleting an windows admin user and some stuff broke before I was able to cancel, but I did a System Restore before that I named "bc_nuke" and everything came back like nothing ever happen, it also helped when I tried to update AMD GPU drivers with their official tool on a, I think at the time, 7 year old computer and it kinda corrupt both it's and intel integrated drivers, used this so I could put my computer in a working condition faster than to remove the drivers and reinstall them while hoping my computer wouldn't freeze up because of the GPU's drivers, it's a laptop that I am still using it, because yes.

[Desaved]

What about when the VSS file becomes corrupted and you don't know until it's too late? Is there a way to fix that? Is there a way to ensure the integrity of the VSS files over time?