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Hands-On Windows 199: System Restore Reborn
00:17:45
Windows 11 Recovery Gets Smarter
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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at a new recovery tool for Windows 11 called Point in Time Restore.
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Podcasts you love from people you trust.
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This is Twit.
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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week I'm going to look at a brand new recovery tool built into Windows 11. It doesn't make for the most exciting of demos, but this stuff is important, right? So, you know, we've been complaining for years about all the insertification and Windows, but the truth is Microsoft has been working to make the system, you know, more stable, you know, more reliable, etc. More secure, more private. Well, not more private actually, but a lot of more is in there. But you know, for the past year and a half or so, of course, at the top of this year, they announced that they were doing this and they've been talking more and more about this. But the security stuff has been going for a while. And Microsoft in it was November 2024, announced the Windows Resiliency Initiative, which has a lot of things going on there, but has resulted in some new features in Windows which we've talked about, right? Like administrative protection. Excuse me, arrived in 20 spring 2025. It was delayed a bit, but it's, it's actually in the system today. Quick Machine recovery, right? Another restore capability. Really nice. There's been more recently a driver quality initiative. Microsoft is starting to take over driver work from third parties, which is kind of interesting. For example, right? They'll, this is a grandfather period, but they've actually just taken over printer driver development. They're not going to let third parties do that in the near future, which is very interesting. And then in the most recent patch Tuesday, or the soon to be patch Tuesday, as I record this for July 2026, we're getting something called Point in Time Restore. So if you are familiar with the recovery tools in Windows 11, you know that this is what we've got here, right? So you go into system recovery. Some of the big ones are reset this PC, which is the nuke from orbit option where you can refresh or reset factory reset it. You can zero out the disk if you want to sell the computer and give it away, etc. This advanced startup tool is a way to get into the Windows recovery environment, which is something that occurs outside of Windows, right? Like when Windows is offline, so to speak. Quick Machine Recovery is that thing I just mentioned. And then Point in Time Restore. And I think, you know, when I think about this, and I should say, actually, I'm sorry, there are others. You can also reinstall the version of Windows using Windows Update that's also new to the past several months. And then the troubleshooting stuff which has been in Windows for a while. When you think about having, you're having problems, whatever it might be, something's not reliable, things aren't working correctly. This kind of an escalation that you can go through, things like Quick Machine Recovery is automatic, something like this fixed problems with Windows Update is something that you do and you kind of initiate and it's non destructive, right? So you can reinstall Windows without blowing away any of your data, any of the apps you have installed. It's kind of a nice thing. But then in the middle we've got this new thing, right? Which if you're familiar with Windows, you might think, well, wait a minute, I've heard of something like this. And that something was called System Restore. And sure enough, it's still hiding inside of Windows, right? You can find it with Start Search. So this is the old school kind of control panel interface you can enable, which it is already on this computer. You could go in and create a restore point, give it a name. You could run System Restore from here and restore to a previous point in time. And the idea here is that maybe you installed a driver, although those things tend to self rectify. But whatever it might be some software, something screw something up, Windows isn't working correctly. You can restore, go back in time, reboot the computer, and then that thing will not be installed anymore. So this was always a good idea. The problem with System Restore is that it was never modernized. And that's what Point in Time restore is. It's a rewritten, brand new modern version of System Restore. It has a couple of interesting advantages over System restore. One of them is that includes your user data. So if you have documents or other files and those are going to be part of the restore, it also has some things that are not as good, right? So I mentioned here, and you can see it here, I could start a restore from within Windows. I can't show you this here because it's outside of Windows, but you could also boot into the Windows Recovery environment and access your restore points from there and restore from outside of Windows. With Point in Time restore. That's the only way you can do it right now. That might change in the near future. The other downside I would say is there's no way to do a manual restore. Manual restore point. What this does instead is it creates a single restore point every 24 hours. It saves a maximum of 72 hours worth of restore points, and it manages disk space much better than system restore used to. We'll look at that in a moment. But some pros and cons. I think in the end this is going to end up just being better overall. But even today I think it's just nice to have something that's more modern. All right, so let's. We'll take a look at that in one moment, but first, let's take a quick break.
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So there are two sides to point in time restore, if that makes sense. There's this little management interface here. So if I click View or edit, got to go through a user account dialog there. And even though there's a lot of stuff going on here, there's actually only two things you can do here. You could turn it off point in time restore is on by default and you can set how much disk space it's allowed to use. By default, it's going to use 2% of the disk size max. It's actually really never going to reach that number, probably because it's only saving 72 hours, meaning three. It's really like three restore points, right. I don't know why this is. No snapshots available. I actually have snapshots on this computer. But again, you know, beta software, whatever. But if you're in a managed environment, if you're an admin and you're, you're, you know, managing this and other computers for workers, you can actually program or configure these other things, right? So you could go in and manually, you could have a different number of restore points you store. You could restore them on a different frequency and so forth. So there's, there's other options in here, but for individuals, for people who are running Windows 11 Home or Pro, not a lot to do here. It just kind of happens automatically. Right? But that's kind of the nature of restore tools, right? The idea here is that you don't think about this or worry about it until something goes wrong. And then when something goes wrong, you think, well, okay, what can I do, you know, to fix this? And so this is one of the things you can do to do this though. You have to get into the Windows recovery environment. I can't boot this computer into that now because then I wouldn't be able to record the screen But I do have this virtual machine running and it is in the Windows recovery environment. Right. And so this is, if you're a technical user, you probably, you know, you might see this all the time. If you're an average mainstream user, you have may have never seen this, but the way you can get to this from within Windows is to click Restart. Now, I will not do that. But next to advanced startup and this, this what your computer will reboot and then it will go to this screen. Right. If you have recovery media of any kind, you can make a recovery disk in Windows. If you have the Windows installation media that lets you recover as well. If something is wrong with your computer, it might just go into this automatically. There are various ways to get to this, but this is typically what it looks like to see Point in Time Restore. Here you're going to go into troubleshoot. It's now the top option here. And this is the hilarious screen. Oh, good, it's not even working. Okay, so let me just show you a. I'm just going to turn this thing off because that was pointless, but I'll just show you a screenshot instead because what happens is you have to Type in your BitLocker recovery key before you can use Point in Time Restore. That is a crazy requirement. This is a 48 digit alphanumeric code. It's, you know, it'd be very easy to type it in incorrectly. You're offline in Windows, so you can't access it from Windows. You have to have this thing on your phone or some other device, another computer, whatever it might be. There's a whole thing you have to go through to make that work. But, but that's the world we live in. And that's why if they would let you do this from within Windows, which I think they will in the future, this will be a much more seamless process because you're. I'm signed into a Microsoft account here. It could go get it from OneDrive, which is where it would be stalled by default. I wouldn't have to type it in, but typing in a. You know, if you haven't, you haven't lived until you've, until you've typed it. A BitLocker recovery key. But let me see if I can find a picture of this. Yeah, so. It's probably this one here. So this is not the greatest picture because it's kind of zoomed in, but you get the idea. So this is the screen it usually comes up. So you type in this code, you know, if you do it correctly and Click, Continue. You're good. You know, if you don't, you gotta fix it. At least it doesn't erase it. It takes a while. I've had good luck with this recently for some reason, but, you know, this is. You could imagine this is a place you could really screw this up. Once you get past this, what you'll see is a list of the restore points you have. I just showed you in, in this system, for some reason, I actually don't have any, but if I did on that computer, you would see a list of dates and times, you know, and sizes, and it would be here in the list and you would see that same list and you click on the one you want, you know, are you sure it will mention something about data loss? Because if you think about it, you're using a computer, you have files on the computer, you're doing whatever you're doing for work, something goes wrong and you're like, oh, boy, I have to restore this to a previous point in time. And that's great. But if you have files in your user directories, meaning under your user folder, right, which by default for me is not on my phone, is in Users Paul, right? Anything in here that, that was made, like created or modified after that restore point was made could be lost, right? If you are not backing up your folder to OneDrive and you have a file here, you restore it to 9 o' clock in the morning, you know, hours ago, that file will be gone, right? So the advice here is the advice Microsoft has been given for a long time, which is you should be using OneDrive in their view or whatever cloud service to have whatever files you're working on always syncing to the cloud. Because in that case, it doesn't matter if the restore point is older than when that file was in use, because it's syncing from the cloud. So you're always going to get the latest version. It's going to be fine. They also support version control and all that kind of thing. But there is a. I mentioned this only because that data loss warning might be a little alarming. You know, if, you know, you know, you're worried that you're going to. I'm going to restore my computer and then lose some files I was working on. If you're doing things correctly is a tough term, but if you're doing things in a way that will keep your data safe, you know, which to me is syncing them on to some cloud service, whatever you choose that will prevent that problem. So there's that
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And then there's the whole system restore comparison. Like I said, I mean I, I think they're going to close the gap on certain place in certain ways and I think it's already better in certain ways. So we'll see what happens there. But there you go. It's just a, I said, not a great demo but a really useful feature that you will be so happy exists if you need it. And if this doesn't solve the problem for you somehow, you have these other options you can go through, right? There's the nuke or yeah, nuke from orbit option. Like I said, reset this PC which has been in Windows for over a decade and works basically the same as it ever has. But this is a way just to nuke the whole thing and just go back to a clean install if that's what you want. In that case, once again, you know, syncing to a cloud data storage provider makes a lot of sense because you don't have to worry about data loss. You're going to be fine. You know, just by, just by doing that it makes some of these other restore options less scary, I guess is the way to maybe to say it timing wise. This feature is coming in the July 2026 Patch Tuesday update. So it'll be generally available by the time you see that. So widgets, I think was the previous episode, same thing. Those are, those are July 2026 features. So you're just going to get them right. And then we talked about some bigger features. You know, Taskbar, Start menu, Windows Update. They're all in different schedules, but you should be able to see, I think this computer, this computer has the new Windows Update as well. So broadly speaking, I think this summer or by fall certainly, I mean all the new features we've been talking about, some of the ones we'll talk about in future episodes, should be available pretty quick. Otherwise obviously get into the Insider program. Okay, well, thank you for watching. I hope this was interesting on some level. Wasn't the best demo in the world, sorry. But really useful feature. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the show at Twitter tv How. Thank you for watching. Again, thank you especially to our Club Twit members. If you're not a member, please do consider joining and you can learn more about that program at TWiT TV. Club TWiT. Thank you. I'll see you next week.
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