Two problems with XP restore points:



At most, XP retains only two points, the current one and the previous one usually the previous day or two. There is plenty of room relegated for restore points. My wife’s new vista notebook has restore points going back for two months.
The XP task scheduler is set to call for a RP at 7:30am daily. This may set once a week at most. I did all the research and saw that Norton interferes so I made the temporary changes and still don’t get an RP. On the Vista machine I uninstalled Norton and am using Avast. These are automatic RPs and date back to the week I made the change to Avast more than two months ago.


I am using SysRestorePoint.exe and get about a 50% success rate but condition #1 still exists. I have four hard drives: C, D, F and G. F was the original C until I added a new drive and made it the C drive. F still has XP on it along with other stuff. System Restore is monitoring all four drives and none can be turned off. All drives are set for SR to use 12% of available space and the C drive shows almost 3GB.



Any ideas?



Art Goertzen

Ahwahnee, CA

Art,

I had the same problem you have.  I was only able to keep 1 or 2 restore points at a time for a couple of days.  Then it struck me that the 12% is not enough for drives that are half full or more.  Restore Points are for your computer system as a whole, not for each drive, even though you can allocate space on each drive.  I solved my problem by turning off System Restore for my D: drive, which is nearly full of downloaded files and partition backups of my C: drive.  Since I keep copies of all those downloads and backups on DVDs and an external USB drive, I don't need System Restore turned on for my D: drive.  Now I have Restore Points going back to July 5th (2+ months).  They only cover my C: drive, which is quite loaded with the OS and programs, but not nearly as loaded as my D: drive.  It took me a very long time to figure this out.

If your drives are fairly full, especially your 2 drives with WinXP on them (which has lots and lots of files), it's no wonder you can't keep more than 2 Restore Points if System Restore is watching 4 hard drives.  You said you cannot turn off some of the drives.  Somehow you've got to, and just have System Restore watch your active C: drive that's running your daily WinXP session.  I believe that will solve your problem.

You may need to turn off System Restore on All drives (put a check in the check box controlling all drives), then reboot.  Next remove the checkmark and go into your D:, F:,and G: drives and put a check in the box to disable monitoring of those drives.  Then run the system for a few days and see if you can establish more Restore Points, probably several more.  If you can, then you're going to need to stop watching the D:, F:, and G: drives, or backup/remove many of the files on those drives if you want to try having System Restore watch them.  If you have one drive that has only a few files on it, you might try activating System Restore on it after a few days to see if you can still establish several restore points.  This could be used as your data drive.

This is just my suggestion to you, and it may or may not work for you.  But it did work for me once I quit watching a nearly full D: drive and now keep backups just in case the D: drive does crash.  I still keep all my downloads and backups on my D: drive simply for convenience and quick access, but I don't have System Restore watch them.

Hope this helps.