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Microsoft Issues Warning For 800M Windows 10 Users (forbes.com) 308

Consumer tech reporter Gordon Kelly describes "an important new Windows 10 warning (and the failure behind it)" for all 800 million of Microsoft's Windows 10 users: What Microsoft confirms it did was quietly switch off Registry backups in Windows 10 eight months ago, despite giving users the impression this crucial safeguarding system was still working. As Ghacks spotted at the time, Registry backups would show "The operation completed successfully", despite no backup file being created...

Microsoft has now spelt out what was actually happening: "Starting in Windows 10, version 1803, Windows no longer automatically backs up the system registry to the RegBack folder. If you browse to the WindowsSystem32configRegBack folder in Windows Explorer, you will still see each registry hive, but each file is 0kb in size...."

So why has Microsoft done this? In the company's own words: "to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows". And how big is a registry backup? Typically 50-100MB.

The article notes that this issue was flagged in Microsoft's Feedback Hub -- last October -- but "only now is the company coming clean about what happened."

The Ghacks blog points out that the Registry backup option "has been disabled but not removed according to Microsoft. Administrators who would like to restore the functionality may do so by changing the value of a Registry key."
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Microsoft Issues Warning For 800M Windows 10 Users

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  • Wut? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lobiusmoop ( 305328 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @05:39AM (#58853744) Homepage

    Saving 50-100MB from the typical 15-20GB disk footprint of a stock Windows 10 install? What's the point?

    • Re:Wut? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by herve_masson ( 104332 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @05:47AM (#58853780)

      Especially when my win10 systems hold 10G worth of driver backups (DriverStore) I can't figure out how to cleanup...

      • Re:Wut? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @07:36AM (#58854166) Homepage Journal

        Probably not 10GB of actual disk space though. Most of those backup files, as well as multiple copies of DLLs to avoid DLL hell, are actually just symlinks to the same file. Explorer and many other file management tools don't understand that and count each link as a full size copy.

        • Just tested with sysinternals "du -u" ; gave me 9.5Gb distinct files. Not far from what windirstat gave me.

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Interesting. What directory?

            • C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore
              I've googled the thing many times ; no simple solution (such as : [x] only preserve 2 copies of each driver)
              Several device manufacturers love to create hundred MB large drivers for reason that is not obvious to me (realtek is one of them) and provide many updates (which is not necessary bad) that accumulate there over time...

              • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                Interesting, thanks. Mine was 5.5GB. Disk cleanup listed driver packages as 0 bytes. I ran it anyway and the folder is still 5.5GB.

                • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  You probably need to grab ownership of that directory. Google "take ownership windows" for relevant third party tool. Windows restricts access to certain directories and files by default, and you need to literally wrestle control back to have any meaningful access to such files.

                  It's been there since at least 7, probably vista, but it went to whole new level of obfuscation with 10.

                • In Windows 7, I call the driver cleanup and other symlinked file cleanups the self-destruct button. Think half the Windows OS is symlinked at this point and buried in some not fully maintained sxs folder tree to keep Disk Cleanup from purging it.
              • by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

                Ugh, last time I bought an HP printer, it came with 3 install discs.

        • Probably not 10GB of actual disk space though. Most of those backup files, as well as multiple copies of DLLs to avoid DLL hell, are actually just symlinks to the same file. Explorer and many other file management tools don't understand that and count each link as a full size copy.

          Ever since Windows added that awful WinSxS (Windows Side-by-Side) bullshit, they have always claimed this.
          Oh, the disk space isn't actually used, it just reports that size!

          1 - It's bullshit. Every version of every DLL is kept forever (in Windows 10, until you get a major version update and effectively reinstall the OS). The bulk of the space is individual, unique files. NOT falsely reported storage for links.

          2 - Even if it weren't bullshit, Explorer and every fucking other application on Windows still se

      • Don't forget all the temp folders eating up your disk space that never self-clean. There's typically C:\Temp, C:\Windows\Temp; C:\Users\%username%\App Data\Local\Temp - plus all the temp folders that individual applications like Microsoft Outlook stash in random locations.
    • If it is part of the "User profile", and backed up on a network, the space is usually limited. Removing essential profile data gives the users more room to put funny videos on the network because they happen to be located under "my videos".
    • Re:Wut? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Cipheron ( 4934805 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @05:49AM (#58853792)

      But that's probably not the only thing they did. Removing RegBack was *a* thing they did to keep the footprint small, not the only thing. If you could count up all the tweaks they did it would probably amount to gigabytes worth of saved space, so it's wrong to focus on any one space-saving measure and ask why they bothered. Each individual tweak may have been small but they add up to allowing the operating system to run on those eMMc laptops with only 16 or 32 GB.

      • Also, it's 50 - 100 MB per *backup*, and you might have more than one backup point. Consider that.

        • Yes but the idiotic decisions were not to control the size of the registry backups by giving the user more control or options. The decision was to disable the feature, not to inform users (and administrators) of the change, and alter the feature to make it look like nothing had changed.

          If the size of the backups were a problem there were a number of options:

          • Allow the limiting of total size of backups
          • Allow the limit of time of the backups
          • Allow the user to select an external location for backups
          • Allow compre
      • Re:Wut? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:23AM (#58853914)

        Although it might be a case of a little here and a little there, I just ran "Disk Cleanup" and its showing 6 GB of savings from "Clean up System Files".

        So whatever it is they're saving elsewhere, they're not grooming these files more aggressively and it seems like pretty low-hanging fruit.

        Whatever Microsoft's motivation, it probably has as much to do with some cloud offering as it does with reduced storage thowaway laptops. I'm sure the easier strategy for that is simply never update them to new builds and then obsolete them when they stop patching that build. Easier to push the obsolescence of throwaway hardware on its purchasers than waste time trying to squeeze in a few GBs of storage savings.

        But if that few GBs is projected to provide *Microsoft* with 10s or 100s of petabytes of cloud storage savings, it's suddenly more worth it to Microsoft.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The system files it refers to are mostly backups made before installing Windows Update patches. It would be nice if Microsoft automatically removed them after say six months, since people are unlikely to want to uninstall patches after that time.

        • Although it might be a case of a little here and a little there, I just ran "Disk Cleanup" and its showing 6 GB of savings from "Clean up System Files".
          So whatever it is they're saving elsewhere, they're not grooming these files more aggressively and it seems like pretty low-hanging fruit.

          You are a victim of timing. Windows will store a complete roll back from major updates for a few months, precisely because of people complaining that updates broke things and allowing people to uninstall them. These get automatically removed after some time, however you can force this by running disk cleanup and selecting to Clean up System Files.

          You can repeat this exercise after every Feature Upgrade, though I'm not sure how it will work in the future given that in the last feature upgrade they introduced

          • I'm pretty sure my laptop is still running 1803, so any of those update files presumably would have been erased.

            My guess is as time goes on -- and if Microsoft keeps releasing incremental upgrades to Windows "10" meant to be run on discreet hardware -- they will figure out some way to do this.

            But my guess is Windows 10 as we know gets phased out for some future Windows which is some weird cloud hybrid OS, kind of like a Chromebook.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re:Wut? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dissy ( 172727 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @09:10AM (#58854598)

        If you could count up all the tweaks they did it would probably amount to gigabytes worth of saved space, so it's wrong to focus on any one space-saving measure and ask why they bothered.

        I would agree that "why they bothered (at all)" isn't the right question. Every little bit helps after all.
        But asking why they went about it the way they did seems a perfectly legit criticism to question.

        Leaving many old backup incrementals laying around is never a good idea, and certainly an area for improvement.
        But disabling the backup process completely while having the system claim the backup completed without errors is a mind boggling way to go about the stated goal of saving disk space.

        The bare minimum I would expect from a disabled backup task is for the system to reflect as much.
        It shouldn't say it completed, with or without errors, it should say it wasn't attempted.

        But even then there are FAR better ways to go about things.
        Instead of fully disabling backups, why not a cleanup process to delete older ones?
        There are many ways to go about that, where so long as at least one backup is kept, the system would be at much less risk than without any backups.

        Microsoft says to use a restore point instead, implying a procedural change in how backups are made.
        Yet prior to 1803 restore points were deleted immediately after any apparently successful install of a feature update. I say apparent because this was found out after an update claims to have worked, broke things, and people found no restore points were left.

        It wouldn't be difficult to have either registry backups or restore points left active, working, but set to only keep X copies and/or for Y time.

        This type of change also makes me wonder about 3rd party backup solutions.
        One of the older backup systems I used on Win Server 2008 would instruct the system to make a registry backup 'now' then copy the backup folder, so as to not risk a live "running system" shadow copy of the active registry being desynced.
        Yes yes that was Win 2008 and Backupexec, but serves as an example how other things may break.

        I'm not even sure exactly how Veeam goes about backing up the Win 10 registry, but that's the problem, are my Veeam backups broken too? Probably not but now I have to go check. If so, this is a huge problem MS has caused. Even if not, this isn't a reasonable problem I should even need to be concerned about.

        So much for the benefit of "At least windows is backwards compatible with itself"

    • I work hard enough to shoot myself in the foot; I don't need assistance!

    • On a system with constrained memory like a Surface, there's lots of other uses for that 100MB. Not to mention the 100MB is PER BACKUP. Whenever a registry change happens you get a new backup, quietly eating space.
    • Saving 50-100MB from the typical 15-20GB disk footprint of a stock Windows 10 install? What's the point?

      The point? The point is that there's more than one of them.

      Ten of them can be one of those gigabytes.

  • by DrTJ ( 4014489 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @05:47AM (#58853776)

    Microsoft thought the disk footprint was too large, and immediately thought of the registry backup as a major culprit? Decided to disable the feature, leaving people without backups and without telling them? Giving the impression that backup-files exist by generating them, but zero-sized? Didn't bother to properly disable the feature by refactoring the function?

    That's five errors in one line of thought. Impressive.

    • They're in competition with Boeing.

      I can't wait to see what the Olympics look like.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @07:47AM (#58854204) Homepage Journal

      I think you attribute far too much intelligence to Microsoft as an organizaton. Some OEM probably complained about the size of Windows installs, and Microsoft decided they should make them smaller. The order came down, some random developer was told to save X gigabytes and went looking for whatever they could find to meet their goals and ace their performance review.

      Apparently they don't have any kind of proper code review either.

    • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @08:28AM (#58854408) Homepage Journal

      Any idiot could see that is stupid. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't hire just any idiot; they hire engineers.

      Engineers, even when they're acting like idiots, are smart. Smart people learn to adapt to their environment. If that environment is dysfunctional, they learn to behave in dysfunctional ways. One form of dysfunction that is perhaps unique to engineers is giving the boss precisely what he asks for. So the boss says something like, "Reduce the footprint of this product by 1 GB by the end of this month." Why 1GB? It's a measurable goal. Why this month? It's when the report on goals is due. If the company's ground you down to the point where you're past giving a shit, you give the boss exactly whatever it takes to get him off your back.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @10:33AM (#58855130) Homepage Journal

        It's a very typical Microsoft solution. I remember once someone asked them how to disable the software MIDI synth in Windows Vista, which apparently you can't, and older MIDI syth software complains that you need to disable it so they don't conflict.

        Anyway, the Microsoft tech comes back with walk-through instructions to uninstall the entire sound card driver. Sure enough, with no sound card the MS MIDI syth disabled itself. Fucking genius.

    • Not really. The number of problems fundamentally solved by recovering a registry backup are close to nil. This also didn't stop a working restore point being made during updates or when requested manually.

      Ultimately they turned off a function that never actually saved anyone and a lot of people didn't even know existed.

      • Ultimately they turned off a function that never actually saved anyone and a lot of people didn't even know existed.

        How do you know that it “never saved anyone”? You can’t possibly know that. Also the average consumer may not know about this feature but admins should know about it—the people that might restore a computer by using the registry backups.

        Additionally, the OP isn’t saying that there isn’t a good reason for the change. His points are that MS made a change, didn’t inform anyone about it, AND modified the feature to appear as if it hadn’t been changed. Many automat

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01, 2019 @05:54AM (#58853810)

    Could save more space by allowing users to uninstall worthless apps in Windows 10 we never wanted in the first place. But letâ(TM)s just remove registry backups because thatâ(TM)s smart.

  • Typical Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ruedii ( 2712279 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @05:59AM (#58853830)

    Microsoft goes and makes a decision for their users and doesn't even tell them about it.

    If they decided that a full registry backup wasn't necessary for certain things, that is fine. Just not make a back up. However, instead they tell you the backup was done successfully and create a fake backup file. I mean, that is a bad decision.

    • You know that the intern just put an if-statement around the block of code to actually write anything to the file.

      In best practice, it makes sure to open the file, read the entire registry into memory, close the file, and continue on (leaking the copy of the registry along the way).

      I kid, but I wouldn't be surprised if it amounted to something like that slipping through.

    • by Moskit ( 32486 )

      Boeing also did not consider it important to tell the pilots about major difference in flying systems that was covered by the faulty MCAS.

    • This is what gets me. Everyone in the thread is arguing whether or not its worthwhile to back up the registry and how much data it really takes. But the real issue is that Microsoft decided to disable it for everyone and take that decision from them. Then on top of that they lied about it being disabled. This is out of character for them. Windows ain't Linux, but Redmond has never been afraid of giving users enough rope to hang themselves either. This is more of an Apple move. But even then Apple usually wo

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          From a PR perspective, a bug would be far more acceptable. I get bugs happen, and sometimes take time to verify and fix. This is just messed up. If they had even come out and said "Hey, we are disabling this by default going forward, but here's how to turn it back on. " when they first did it I would be OK with it. But waiting months to admit they turned it off is just wrong.
    • Microsoft goes and makes a decision for their users and doesn't even tell them about it.

      About things they didn't even know about. I'm not sure why you're outraged about this. Users don't get told about 99.99% of things that change under the hood. It's not like the registry backup has ever saved anyone's windows installation. Registry corruption is the least of people's concerns.

  • Really Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:11AM (#58853878) Homepage

    to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows

    An average Windows 10 installation on a PC with 8GB or RAM consumes close to 20GB of disk space and you're concerned about 100MB of a registry backup?

    An average Windows 10 installation writes over 500MB of various log and temporary files (and never bothers to clean it up automatically last time I checked). Over time temporary files may consume gigabytes of data.

    Also make sure you've checked web browsers cache folders: they can easily eat up to 2GB of disk space (and I've seen Google Chrome cache take whopping 4GB).

    So, what's the real reason?

    • Re:Really Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:33AM (#58853950) Homepage

      to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows

      An average Windows 10 installation on a PC with 8GB or RAM consumes close to 20GB of disk space and you're concerned about 100MB of a registry backup?

      Yes, because there's more than one of them.

      An average Windows 10 installation writes over 500MB of various log and temporary files (and never bothers to clean it up automatically last time I checked). Over time temporary files may consume gigabytes of data.

      I suspect they're looking at those, too.

      Also make sure you've checked web browsers cache folders: they can easily eat up to 2GB of disk space (and I've seen Google Chrome cache take whopping 4GB).

      That's not in their jurisdiction.

      Microsoft has a stated goal to get Windows running well on a device with 32Gb of storage. I applaud them for that.

      • "Microsoft has a stated goal to get Windows running well on a device with 32Gb of storage. I applaud them for that."

        If Microsoft were your child, you could applaud them for that. But since their os used to work fine in 32GB (let alone 4GB, as you suggest) you're just jacking them off for trying to fit into their jeans from college. Microsoft has already had enough handjobs from the ignorant, thanks.

      • Never seen such a poor comment being upvoted on ./ but let's go through your arguments:

        Yes, because there's more than one of them.

        Have you ever heard of compression? Incremental backups? I'm pretty sure you can have 30 of such backups consuming less than 100MB.

        I suspect they're looking at those, too.

        Microsoft cannot possibly be looking into reducing the footprint of applications they cannot control.

        Meanwhile have you ever checked the C:\Windows\Logs and C:\Windows\Software Distribution folders? Then we ha

      • by Targon ( 17348 )

        More than one c:\windows\system32\config\regback directory? Really? Windows restore points get cleared out when there is a new major build, so old restore points go away every 6-12 months for most users as well.

        Having a backup of the registry files is VERY useful for times when system restore breaks(which happens all too often). Since Microsoft removed the ability to manually copy the registry files out of a restore point back in the days of Vista, having the ability to manually restore the registry i

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The curse of the "Low Hanging Fruit" problem is the real reason.

      There is a systemic issue, and business just try to get the low handing fruit, they spend so much trying to get the easiest jobs done, that to extend the metaphor the fruit on the top begin to rot.

      100MB while not a lot and doesn't solve the problem that much, was an easy change.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:58AM (#58854050)

    Unfortunately, this is not the only backup they are in the process of quietly removing. When my desktop got 'upgraded' to 1903, my Windows Essentials client backups stopped working. And the classic advice to remove the client connector and reinstall doesn't work -- the software will no longer reinstall because it doesn't see the server. Interestingly, my server shares were still connected. And my account still authenticates to the domain. And as far as I can tell, file history is still moving changes to the server. But no more backups.

    Found the client connector install did log an error -- which after much digging turns out to be a change in how the software is allowed access to the server to register itself in AD. Server 2016 and 2019 use this new mechanism. 2012R2 does not. There was a discussion in the text about legacy systems and accommodating them but no actual information. My environment is a mix of Win 7, Win 10 and Linux hosts so it sounded like I needed two servers or of course pitch all my non-compliant machines. But in the discussion of Server 2019 was the phrase 'essentials client backups are being depreciated'. And the blog discussion was that they don't backup applications anymore because they are easy to reinstall, just the precious user data. Obviously written by an exec type who has never had to reinstall a bunch of major applications, all with their own activation logic, patches and so forth. After a couple of days I am part way through my list... grrr.

    My guess is the goal is to reduce our machines to modern 3270 terminals... without telling anybody until it was too late. And if your internet connection to mother Microsoft goes down, guess you are SOL.

    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      Bill Gates state that goal an a conference in 1997... ish.

      S glorified system-settings database?He also wanted everyone to have chip cards to slide into computer in order for them to work, and he want MS to have complete control over your living room.

  • by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @07:30AM (#58854138)
    Didn't we just have a slashdot article on the dangers of unauthorized "repairs" to Microsoft computers? This sidestepping the administrator needs to end.
  • I had to fix up a customers computer because of of a bad sector in one of the registry files. If I had been able to use the registry backup it would have made things much easier.

  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @08:01AM (#58854254)
    Why do people tolerate MS accessing their computers whenever it wants, and doing pretty much whatever it wants in them? Don't they care?
    • I know, it's getting almost as bad as Android/Google Play for updates breaking and altering working stuff.

  • I say that given how much Microsoft stuff just forgets things. Visual Studio was constantly forgetting my preferences, so much so I now just save the config to a file after I'm done putting in my settings after installation. SQL server is constantly forgetting passwords even if you check off the "Remember my login" check box. Now this, I won't be surprised if you turn it on it will start "forgetting" the registry.
  • I can only imagine. By the Indian-Nigerian criminal gangs!

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @09:06AM (#58854582)
    ... that Microsoft apparently has little care about the reliable and durability of a Windows installation. Trading 100MB on today's current disks? There's nothing, absolutely nothing, that Microsoft could trim in their Windows install, so they had to remove a critical backup ability?
  • Boot to the Linux partition and just copy the entire Windows partition and run it through gzip.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      May use pbzip2 instead, but that I what I have been doing for decades. Only thing that works reliably for this complete crapware.

  • I went through all the steps to reinstate this crap and I stopped when I found that my Scheduled Tasks didn't list the proper task. Couldn't (quickly enough) find literature on how to establish that task.

    However, when I take risks with regedit, I export the whole goddam thing out to a flat plain text file with .reg extension.

    Hell, I dfidn't know this fucking easter egg was even there and I've been in the biz 28 years.

    In my research, most posts were recommendations starting, with Win7, to remove the goddam t

  • Because doing something _this_ extremely stupid, without telling their users, for a 50-100M space saving is beyond demented. It looks very much like MS is now run by utterly demented morons that cannot even get simple things right.

  • Why does the Windows Registry typically take up 50-100MB of storage space?

    Isn't that a bit large for what is basically just a glorified system-settings database?

  • was a fine excuse in 1994, not any longer.

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