Rollback and System Restore

[twl845]

After installing RB I read in the instructions that RB disables System Restore. As I was shutting down my computer Windows 7 put up a window saying they were installing an update and I shouldn't shut down or pull the plug. The progress bar started going and going until after it became obvious it was just spinning its wheels. It was then I remembered that system restore couldn't create a restore point because of RB. I had to uninstall RB to get the update. I didn't get a chance to find out if there is a way to selectively activate System Restore for moments like that before I had to uninstall. I'm not re-installing unless there is. Does anyone have an answer for it? Thanks in advance for any help.

[nexstar]

I never normally have System Restore enabled and I have never had a problem in getting updates. I think there may have been some other reason why it hung but not creating a restore point shouldn't be the cause.

Was SR actually disabled on your system by the installation of RB? If so, did it ask you if you wanted it disabled?

It's just that, as you've discovered, SR is normally disabled for the reasons explained here. I recently reinstalled RB with SR enabled and found it was still enabled after installation, which was a bit unexpected.

By the way, the same article also states that it is ok to enable SR at any time after installing RB so you do have that option if you want/need to. It's just a bit counter-productive having it enabled alongside RB.

Graham

[twl845]

Originally Posted by nexstar

I never normally have System Restore enabled and I have never had a problem in getting updates. I think there may have been some other reason why it hung but not creating a restore point shouldn't be the cause.

Was SR actually disabled on your system by the installation of RB? If so, did it ask you if you wanted it disabled?

It's just that, as you've discovered, SR is normally disabled for the reasons explained here. I recently reinstalled RB with SR enabled and found it was still enabled after installation, which was a bit unexpected.

By the way, the same article also states that it is ok to enable SR at any time after installing RB so you do have that option if you want/need to. It's just a bit counter-productive having it enabled alongside RB.

Graham

Thanks for your response. What I'm trying to find out is if there is some place on the RB GUI where you can toggle SR on and off as needed or do it on demand some other way.

[nexstar]

Not from within RB, no. But you can still enable/disable it with a few mouse clicks from within Windows itself so there wouldn't be much point really.

[nexstar]

There's a walkthrough here of how to enable/disable SR which demonstrates it better than I could.

The point I was trying to make was that you shouldn't need to turn it on and off but you also need to be aware of the potential implications of doing so.

Supposing you turn it on, create some restore points and take a snapshot. The space taken up by SR is locked into that snapshot until it is deleted. So you might then turn off SR and turn it back on again at a later stage. This would create another chunk of data potentially locked into another snapshot and which is simply doubling up on RollBack's functionality.

I'm still sure that there is no need to enable SR for updates but if you felt the need to do it then you could take a RB snapshot (in case the update goes wrong), turn on SR prior to the update and turn it off afterwards before making any further snapshots. You wouldn't have used up disk space then with the SR data.

Graham

[twl845]

Originally Posted by nexstar

There's a walkthrough here of how to enable/disable SR which demonstrates it better than I could.

The point I was trying to make was that you shouldn't need to turn it on and off but you also need to be aware of the potential implications of doing so.

Supposing you turn it on, create some restore points and take a snapshot. The space taken up by SR is locked into that snapshot until it is deleted. So you might then turn off SR and turn it back on again at a later stage. This would create another chunk of data potentially locked into another snapshot and which is simply doubling up on RollBack's functionality.

I'm still sure that there is no need to enable SR for updates but if you felt the need to do it then you could take a RB snapshot (in case the update goes wrong), turn on SR prior to the update and turn it off afterwards before making any further snapshots. You wouldn't have used up disk space then with the SR data.

Graham

Thanks for the info. If SR being on or off was the cause of my update hanging up I can't figure what it was. As per your instructions I accessed System Protection from My Computer. Recovery was off with no disk space allocated for restoring. I turned it on and allocated disk space. I don't know if it was always off or RB turned it off. I don't have enough techie knowledge to figure some things out and learning RB is going to be a little difficult for me. I'm just a little fearful of re-installing it and getting myself into a situation I can't get out of.

[nexstar]

Originally Posted by twl845

I'm just a little fearful of re-installing it and getting myself into a situation I can't get out of.

But that's RollBack's purpose in life .

Seriously, I'm only one user so it would be interesting to know if any other RB users have had any issues with updates requiring System Restore to be turned on. I can't remember seeing anything reported on the forum.

At least you can now turn it on and off at will .

Thanks also for the info on whether it was automatically turned off. It always used to ask you if you wanted it turned off but maybe it doesn't now. Having said that, it also didn't actually turn it off when I tested it so I may just have to check that one again!

Graham

Graham

[Froggie]

Originally Posted by nexstar

Seriously, I'm only one user so it would be interesting to know if any other RB users have had any issues with updates requiring System Restore to be turned on. I can't remember seeing anything reported on the forum.

On all my Win7 and XP installations, I let Rollback TURN OFF the System Restore feature and I've NEVER had any issues of any kind with M$ Updates. In fact, none of the "usual suspects" that normally ask to take a RESTORE POINT have ever done so.

[twl845]

Originally Posted by nexstar

But that's RollBack's purpose in life .

Seriously, I'm only one user so it would be interesting to know if any other RB users have had any issues with updates requiring System Restore to be turned on. I can't remember seeing anything reported on the forum.

At least you can now turn it on and off at will .

Thanks also for the info on whether it was automatically turned off. It always used to ask you if you wanted it turned off but maybe it doesn't now. Having said that, it also didn't actually turn it off when I tested it so I may just have to check that one again!

Graham

Graham

Thanks for your response. I'm still trying to make sense of the Windows update progress bar just going on forever and the update not completing. Later on in the day I attempted to do a defrag, and the defrag progress did the same thing. The analyzing progress bar got half way across the screen and just kept analyzing the same spot not progressing further. I let it do that for two hours thinking it was because I have a 1.5TB HD and it was just taking a long time. I finally stopped the defrag and it was like nothing was accomplished. Then my Malwarebytes started sending pop ups that my firewall had a trojan, and after quarantining it I checked the quarantine and nothing was there. I re-installed the firewall and that fixed that. That's when I tried to do a system restore, and that went on and on too. Taking all these symptoms together, I am now thinking that maybe System restore wasn't the problem with the update, but some other general thing that was happening. Finally I did a Chkdisk scan checking the sectors as well as errors that took a few hours to complete.
Everything seems to be working OK now, but I'm afraid to try anything. LOL

[nexstar]

It might be a good thing to be scared to do anything in this case .

Firstly, you do not want to be defragging with 3rd party utilities with RB installed. It will, as you have found out, achieve nothing and will fill up your hard drive with snapshot data. RB sees the defrag process as changes (which they are) and will record them so you can end up with a huge snapshot and there is no point with RB installed.

I know this is a bit of a learning curve and seems odd that all these things we have been accustomed to doing are now obsolete but, there are good reasons .

There's a sticky at the top here relating to defragging so it is worth having a read of that. There is also some excellent general advice from carfal in a post here which is also worth taking on board.

Going back to System Restore. I've carried out a few tests here and I'd strongly advise turning it off. I was able to restore the system here to a point prior to the RB installation and that gave me a blue screen error on booting. It was recoverable by RB by going back to the baseline snapshot but it's not really a position you want to be in.

Graham