restore points disapearing?

[Jstagzsr]

i recently had to reformat my PC. after getting everything set back up and my 6 freakin hdd's and ssd's formatted with ONLY my known good backed up media folders kept on any drive, drivers all updated, all updates installed. i created a restore point.. i then preceded to install all my apps again that i wrote down on a list. then created another restore point.. then i ran revo uninstaller to uninstall a program that came with another program that i didnt want.. revo creates restore points when it uninstalls things.. thats the ONLY thing i can think of that would be doing this.. Does revo delete your previous restore points when it creates the new one? because i just went to go make another restore point after all my games were done installing and my hdd's were defragged and i noticed that evevry single restore point is gone. the ones i made are gone, the one(s) revo made are gone.. theres not a single restore point available. so i made another one just now.. but wtf.. now ill never have the opportuinity again to make that restore point where my pc was fresh off the update with nothing at all clogging it up. but worse than that, why are they disapearing to begin with? that is pootentially extremely bad. thats why i had to reformat my pc to begin with because my restore points were gone.. now after a fresh install its doing the smae thing/...

is there a way to lock the restore points so they cant be altered without a password? or atleast my permission? or is it possible to export the restore point to a flash drive for example? all a restore point is is a cache of what you have and where right? it shouldnt be too big of a file to export if thats even a thing.. wtf man!!!!!!! im gettin so sick of all these issues.

[mr moose]

25 minutes ago, Jstagzsr said:

i recently had to reformat my PC. after getting everything set back up and my 6 freakin hdd's and ssd's formatted with ONLY my known good backed up media folders kept on any drive, drivers all updated, all updates installed. i created a restore point.. i then preceded to install all my apps again that i wrote down on a list. then created another restore point.. then i ran revo uninstaller to uninstall a program that came with another program that i didnt want.. revo creates restore points when it uninstalls things.. thats the ONLY thing i can think of that would be doing this.. Does revo delete your previous restore points when it creates the new one? because i just went to go make another restore point after all my games were done installing and my hdd's were defragged and i noticed that evevry single restore point is gone. the ones i made are gone, the one(s) revo made are gone.. theres not a single restore point available. so i made another one just now.. but wtf.. now ill never have the opportuinity again to make that restore point where my pc was fresh off the update with nothing at all clogging it up. but worse than that, why are they disapearing to begin with? that is pootentially extremely bad. thats why i had to reformat my pc to begin with because my restore points were gone.. now after a fresh install its doing the smae thing/...

is there a way to lock the restore points so they cant be altered without a password? or atleast my permission? or is it possible to export the restore point to a flash drive for example? all a restore point is is a cache of what you have and where right? it shouldnt be too big of a file to export if thats even a thing.. wtf man!!!!!!! im gettin so sick of all these issues.

 

I don't create restore points anymore, For whatever reason they never seemed to do the job they were supposed to (might just be me).  I use macrium to create an image of the entire C drive instead.  Now I keep two images on another drive,  the last know good image and the most recent image.  

 

Wish I knew what was happening with sys restore, but I hope this helps.

[Jstagzsr]

3 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

I don't create restore points anymore, For whatever reason they never seemed to do the job they were supposed to (might just be me).  I use macrium to create an image of the entire C drive instead.  Now I keep two images on another drive,  the last know good image and the most recent image.  

 

Wish I knew what was happening with sys restore, but I hope this helps.

thats actually a great idea.. how have i never thought of that?? instead of creating a restore point in windows i could clone my c drive when its at a point that its running 100% perfect and in the future i could use that to booth.. and i can create multiple clones for different "restore points".. hmm. awesome idea.. 

still annoying that sys restore wont work but this is a safer way anyway to backup a pc

[TechyBen]

12 minutes ago, Jstagzsr said:

thats actually a great idea.. how have i never thought of that?? instead of creating a restore point in windows i could clone my c drive when its at a point that its running 100% perfect and in the future i could use that to booth.. and i can create multiple clones for different "restore points".. hmm. awesome idea.. 

still annoying that sys restore wont work but this is a safer way anyway to backup a pc

The fuller versions (may be able to do it on the free version too IIRC) allow partial difference copies too. So if you do 1 master, then a few incremental backups, it only backs up the changed folders (or bits if it's that accurate, I've not checked), instead of doing an entire drive every time. Can save quite a bit of space.

 

Also, I now tend to only back up important stuff. I have games on a second drive/partition, and don't back those up (time lost downloading from Steam only). Only annoyance is I lose game saves if they are not manually backed up/flagged/Steam cloud supported.  (Not had a disk failure yet, but did move/delete some games and forget the saves! Lol)

[mr moose]

17 minutes ago, Jstagzsr said:

thats actually a great idea.. how have i never thought of that?? instead of creating a restore point in windows i could clone my c drive when its at a point that its running 100% perfect and in the future i could use that to booth.. and i can create multiple clones for different "restore points".. hmm. awesome idea.. 

still annoying that sys restore wont work but this is a safer way anyway to backup a pc

 

It's also good because in the event of a virus/hdd crash/malware you aren't trying to repair anything, you get a fresh clean working copy without having to do all the installs and updates.

 

 

Which reminds me, it's time to do the monthly backup of all my families PC's.

 

[Jstagzsr]

1 minute ago, TechyBen said:

The fuller versions (may be able to do it on the free version too IIRC) allow partial difference copies too. So if you do 1 master, then a few incremental backups, it only backs up the changed folders (or bits if it's that accurate, I've not checked), instead of doing an entire drive every time. Can save quite a bit of space.

 

Also, I now tend to only back up important stuff. I have games on a second drive/partition, and don't back those up (time lost downloading from Steam only). Only annoyance is I lose game saves if they are not manually backed up/flagged/Steam cloud supported.  (Not had a disk failure yet, but did move/delete some games and forget the saves! Lol)

one time i did have a hard drive completely fail on me and i lost probably 400 gigs of pictures and videos of my kids that i could never replace.. after that im always so paranoid about losing my data. a lot of it is backed up on either facebook or google photos. the tippy top priority stuff is anyway. but i have like 745 gigs now of pix and vids and music that i have backed up on 2 different drives. i have 4 hard drives and 1 2.5mm ssd and 1 nvme ssd. i have two 1tb and two 500gb hdd's. i wanna learn how to raid them just incase one does fail. if nothing else its annoying af to restore media from the backups. 750gigs takes me like 2 hours to transfer from one hdd to another. all my games are saved locally too but all the games i play are also saved in the cloud. either on steam, origin, battle net, or epic games. so i care far less about those then i do my media.

[TechyBen]

Raid rebuild would take roughly the same time as a restore, as it still needs to copy the HDD over to the new copy/mirror. The difference is, you get some use while the raid rebuilds, but IMO it's not worth the risk for a home user with just a 2 drive raid. In a larger system (Like Linus editor file servers) the system can still render video (for example) while 1 of the raid disks rebuilds... still risky (as your hammering the file server, and it could cause more failures), but it means they don't lose a days worth of work hours waiting for it to rebuild/restore.

 

Though others might give better info on this forum. That's just my rough understanding.

[Jstagzsr]

5 hours ago, TechyBen said:

Raid rebuild would take roughly the same time as a restore, as it still needs to copy the HDD over to the new copy/mirror. The difference is, you get some use while the raid rebuilds, but IMO it's not worth the risk for a home user with just a 2 drive raid. In a larger system (Like Linus editor file servers) the system can still render video (for example) while 1 of the raid disks rebuilds... still risky (as your hammering the file server, and it could cause more failures), but it means they don't lose a days worth of work hours waiting for it to rebuild/restore.

 

Though others might give better info on this forum. That's just my rough understanding.

i was looking at it more from an angle of like if one of my drive fails then my data is still safe on the other drive. not from a restoring angle. i care less about the restore time when the options are lose or dont lose all my media. but i know very little about raid. just what i learned in passing.

[Jstagzsr]

5 hours ago, TechyBen said:

......Like Linus editor file servers..

i literally just thought to myself "oh wow thats cool this dude knows about linus too.." and then immediately afterwards realized were talking on Linus' website. lmao.

[TechyBen]

1 hour ago, Jstagzsr said:

i was looking at it more from an angle of like if one of my drive fails then my data is still safe on the other drive. not from a restoring angle. i care less about the restore time when the options are lose or dont lose all my media. but i know very little about raid. just what i learned in passing.

Yeah. Raid lowers downtime, but you would still need backups (for when the computer gets water spilt on it/lightning strike/etc).

[Jstagzsr]

2 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Yeah. Raid lowers downtime, but you would still need backups (for when the computer gets water spilt on it/lightning strike/etc).

so raid is designed for having no downtime on larger servers by rebuuilding single drives out of dozens when one fails and not for running 2 devices are real time cloned in order to preserve data in the case of a drive failure? and even if i was running raid i would still need other backups on top of the raid config? i had it very wrong if thats the case

[TechyBen]

Just now, Jstagzsr said:

so raid is designed for having no downtime on larger servers by rebuuilding single drives out of dozens when one fails and not for running 2 devices are real time cloned in order to preserve data in the case of a drive failure? and even if i was running raid i would still need other backups on top of the raid config? i had it very wrong if thats the case

"Raid is not backup" is a mantra.

Because, say you delete the wrong file, get a virus, or have Windows update crash out, and need an full reinstall. A backup from yesterday, is still there, and will restore. A RAID will still have the deletion, virus or corrupt Windows install. That's before mentioning some faults take out the computer + data, even in a "raid" (like water cooling leaking over everything). However, lots of backups can be on seperate circuits (own power surge protection) or only plugged in when backing up (though some leave on 24/7 network connections).

[Jstagzsr]

1 minute ago, TechyBen said:

"Raid is not backup" is a mantra.

Because, say you delete the wrong file, get a virus, or have Windows update crash out, and need an full reinstall. A backup from yesterday, is still there, and will restore. A RAID will still have the deletion, virus or corrupt Windows install. That's before mentioning some faults take out the computer + data, even in a "raid" (like water cooling leaking over everything). However, lots of backups can be on seperate circuits (own power surge protection) or only plugged in when backing up (though some leave on 24/7 network connections).

ok. that makes perfect sense when you look at it like that. But say theres no leaks or lightning strikes (i have an asatek aio and i have everything plugged into a ups) and say everything software wise is running perfect but then one drive fails, in that case raid would be a good thing right? even with just 2 drives? because i can replace the failed drive and let it rebuild while everything on the other drive is still in that "perfect" state it was in before the other drive failed?

[Alan G]

9 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

I don't create restore points anymore, For whatever reason they never seemed to do the job they were supposed to (might just be me).  I use macrium to create an image of the entire C drive instead.  Now I keep two images on another drive,  the last know good image and the most recent image.  

 

 

That's my approach as well.  I use NovaBackup and they have a system image utility that works quickly and you can program it to reimage every week so if there have been updates to any program, new programs, etc. you will always have a current OS image in case disaster strikes. All data is on a separate drive that is backed up each day to a second data drive and Amazon Web Services.

[Jstagzsr]

1 minute ago, Alan G said:

That's my approach as well.  I use NovaBackup and they have a system image utility that works quickly and you can program it to reimage every week so if there have been updates to any program, new programs, etc. you will always have a current OS image in case disaster strikes. All data is on a separate drive that is backed up each day to a second data drive and Amazon Web Services.

that sounds great. i dont imagine its free though is it? or crackable?

[Alan G]

NovaBackup is not free but there are some free solutions.  WD hard drives had a version of Acronis that you could download but I don't know that is still the case.  Macrium's home version is free.  I bought NovaBackup as we have three PCs that need backing up and there's a discount but like everything else these days, they moved to a yearly subscription model.