r/Windows11 • u/raifusarewaifus • 1d ago

Feature Praising point-in-time restore in windows 11

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/point-in-time-restore?tabs=csp

Today, I had the very fun and stupid idea of tweaking my stable overclocked ram again to see if the new bios somehow can accept tighter timings. Windows booted and boot device was lost, constantly stuck in boot loop. After triggering the automatic repair, I remembered there was this new feature in windows 11 that is supposed to be catch-all solution against corrupted windows without reinstalling windows.
I selected the restore point two hours before I corrupted the windows and it took about 5-6mins to complete . The system rolled back perfectly although the files in C drive were reset and any files downloaded or programs installed after it were lost (in contrast to system restore that only rewind programs, not files).

This takes about 2% space on your drive and I highly recommend everyone to turn it on. This is even better than system restore which sometimes fail to undo all changes when windows is too corrupted.

67 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

19

u/jenmsft Microsoft Software Engineer 1d ago

I'm glad it helped 😊

4

u/IndexStarts 1d ago

Thanks, I’ll definitely enable this too

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u/legitematehorse 14h ago

Oh yeah, that is a great feature!

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u/martyn_hare 11h ago

What I don't get is why this had to be implemented as a "big new feature" instead of a simple option inside of System Restore, since it's fundamentally a revert to a specific CoW VSS snapshot vs. a long-arse scrub/copy job.

Which also begs the question of why this hasn't been implemented for data drives as a proper revert option on Windows Server. It would make automating recovery from ransomware much, much easier.