jimgobucks46 wrote:
> i can't get system restore to go back to a previous month...i have only 2
> restore points in august and i need to go back to july...i click on the
> previus month arrow but nothing happens...any thoughts?
You can assign a limited amount of space, for the "System Volume Information"
folder on your C: drive. Mine is set to the default of 12% of the C: drive.
Perhaps if you'd turned that number down severely, it has limited the
maximum space the restore points can hold ?
Right now, I can click the arrow on the "calendar" of System Restore,
and mine goes back to May.11, 2010.
If I look in the "System Volume Information" folder, I see
System Volume Information
_restore{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}
RP166 May 11, 2010
RP167 May 12, 2010
...
RP232 Aug 8, 2010
drivetable.txt
fifo.log
_driver.cfg
_filelist.cfg
So at least, I have restore point folders which correspond to
what my calendar is doing in the System Restore screen. (The oldest
restore point is thrown away, when a new one needs to be written, and
my 12% of space is used up. If your space allocation setting is very
small, there might only be room for two restore points.)
There are some recipes for gaining access to that folder, here.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309531
( got link from
http://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/System_Volume_Information )
If you have two restore points in August, and today is August 9,
my guess would be, those two points used up all the allocated
space. Moving the slider to some minimum value would have done
that. Like I said above, mine is set to 12% of my C: drive
(for no particular reason, and no, I would not try to restore
to May.11
). And as a consequence, my calendar has several
months worth, And I only see a couple dates missing from that
collection. Otherwise, I'm averaging about one RP a day.
My average restore point size is about 40MB or so (just holding my
mouse over a few of the RPxxx folders and getting size info).
And a good deal of that (perhaps 75%), is registry files.
If you didn't want to fool around with the permissions on the files
that they made so hard to get to, booting a Linux LiveCD should
give you access to that folder, so you can check dates and folder
info. Ubuntu and Knoppix are examples of LiveCD distros, suitable
for simple maintenance tasks. By default, Knoppix tends to mount
things read-only, which gives some protection against doing
stupid things. You have to know which dialog to enter, in Knoppix,
to change access to the Windows partition to read/write, which
means you explicitly are giving permission to make changes.
Which is a nuisance and a feature, all in one.
Paul
