Microsoft Sets New 60-Day Limit For System Restore Points In Windows 11 Update

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Microsoft has changed how Windows 11 manages System Restore points after its June 2025 security update. The update, KB5060842, says that starting with Windows 11 version 24H2, System Restore points will be kept for up to 60 days. After 60 days, restore points older than 60 days will no longer be available for use. [...] The change does not change the way restore points are created or used; it only sets a clear time limit for how long they are stored. Windows will still delete older restore points if the allocated disk space fills up. But now there is a firm upper limit of 60 days, regardless of available space. The report notes that restore points in Windows 11 have varied. "Some restore points were removed after only 10 days, while others sometimes lasted the full 90 days, as reported by XDA Developers."

The new 60-day limit should give users more certainty about how long their restore points will remain on their system.

Just ... why?

[Travelsonic]

Seriously, why should restore points have that kind of limit? Why shouldn't they last as long as the user wants them to? Am I missing something, or is Microsoft sniffing the retard juice again?

Doesn't explain

[Excelcia]

If the snapshot data changes the system has to store additional data to maintain access to multiple versions.

This makes retention a function of storage space, and the number of changes made. This doesn't explain why it should be a hard-limit function of time. There is already, and has been since System Restore was implemented, a way to limit restore points to a percentage of disk space. If you don't make many changes and/or want to dedicate more space to System Restore, how is a 60 day hard limit of any

Re:

[PPH]

What happened 60 days ago that Microsoft wants you to forget...

I can't remember. [ssl-images-amazon.com]

Re: Just ... why?

[francisew]

It does seem incredibly stupid. An old backup is often extremely useful. Yeah, it might need patching to update drivers if used, but that's a very low cost.

Good thing for Snapshots

[Balthisar]

VM Snapshots are simpler to manage anyway.

Cynical me suspects an agenda

[shm]

More likely this is something to do with forcing updates (towards subscriptions?) which you can not undo by resorting older versions.

But then I would not know, we switched away from all things Microsoft to Linux and macOS years ago.

Re:

[cawdor]

^ This. Microsoft does nothing for the user's benefit, only for its own. Which generally involves taking user's control away in some form or another. This is yet another example of that. I suggest people use a free program such as Macrium Reflect (free for personal use, paid for more features and corpo use) for their regular system backups if you want to retain full control over your rollbacks, regardless of age. I am not affiliated with them, but have used Macrium for many years. I'm sure there are plenty

Re:

[RitchCraft]

It feels like 1984 all over again.

Re:

[caseih]

Yes, that is serious. I mean we're talking how some updates set the restore point to be deleted after 10 days (and some were as long as 90), whereas now all updates will set the delete time to 60 days for consistency.

For sure, going from 10 to 60 days is definitely 1984 all over again (although I'm not quite sure when the previous one was for you).

System Restore Is a Hack

[organgtool]

Microsoft, it's time to create a copy-on-write file system that can take snapshots and pair it with a boot loader capable of booting from other older snapshots (similar to Time Shift in Linux). Stop dicking around with spyware that no one asked for and start providing features that are actually useful.

Re:

[caseih]

Meanwhile I'll settle for having a file system that lets you overwrite in-use files without requiring a reboot, like Unix has for decades. I've never understood why NTFS cannot do this.