Setting Up and Using Windows 10 System Restore

We have all been here, finding that that update you installed or that new driver install is causing problems when it shouldn’t be. This unfortunately is not the time to start thinking about protecting yourself.

 

You always want to be thinking proactively about your system health, after all it does so much for you why shouldn't you do a little work to make sure its failsafe is available. Because you don't always know when a problem could arise, you could just be installing a new program, updating a driver, or Windows could be installing an update then you could be unable to boot, have system stability problems, and many other issues.

 

When setup correctly Windows System Restore can help safeguard the software side of your system against pretty aggressive failures. But this is not a backup solution, we always recommend a dedicated backup because while Windows System Restore does do quite a bit it does not touch or backup personal files in the user directory. However, it will remove apps, drivers, system updates, and registry changes after the restore point was made.

 

Windows System Restore is usually enabled by default but sometimes it is not (e.g. Default OS drive is ≤128GB). In this article I will show you how to enable Windows System Restore, create a restore point, and how to use that restore point.

 

Enabling System Restore

 

Step 1: Open Start menu by clicking on the taskbar button or by pressing the Windows key.

Step 2: Without clicking anything start typing “Create a restore point”, this will open “System Protection”

 

Step 3: Inside the “System Protection” window navigate to the “System Protection” tab. Here you will see all of the drives in your system, including the main “C” drive.

Step 4: Select the drive you wish to setup or modify restore settings of and select “Configure”

 

Step 5: Select “Turn on system protection

 

Step 6: Under the “Disk Space Usage” section you can manually select the amount of space that you would like to make available for restore points. This is default is quite reasonable but if you want to be safe you can expect that each restore point will use around 1GB of drive space so you can adjust the slider accordingly.

1. While creating restore points the system will go until the allocated space is full and then will make more space by deleting the oldest restore point available.

2. Also there is a delete option that will allow you to delete all of the restore points for this drive.

Step 7: After completing be sure to “apply” the changes, Then verify that the drive now has protection turned on.

 

Manually Creating a Restore Point

 

After enabling System Restore your system will now automatically create a point whenever the system encounters a common significant change. But it has a limited knowledge of what a significant change is, so sometimes you may want to manually create a restore point before doing making any large modifications. To manually create a restore point you will :

 

Step 1: Open Start menu by clicking on the taskbar button or by pressing the Windows key.

Step 2: Without clicking anything start typing “Create a restore point”, this will open “System Protection”

Step 3: Once the “System Protection” window is open select the system disk

Step 4: Click Create button

 

Step 5: You can now type in a description of why this restore point is being created.

Step 6: Click Create

 

Restore Your System From a Point

 

Step 1: Open Start menu by clicking on the taskbar button or by pressing the Windows key.

Step 2: Without clicking anything start typing “Create a restore point”, this will open “System Protection”

 

 

Step 3: Click “System Restore” button, Then “Next”

 

Step 4: Now you will see available points you can restore to

1. You can also see if they were automatically created restore points or manually created restore points.

2. With a restore point selected you can click on “Scan for affected programs” which will show you what programs have been modified since this restore point was made. (Click “Close” to continue)

Step 5: Select the restore point you wish to use. Click "Next" and then "Finish"

Step 6: The system should restart after the restore and then your system will have “gone back in time to that point”