Microsoft Sets New 60-Day Limit For System Restore Points In Windows 11 Update (extremetech.com) 65
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.
The new 60-day limit should give users more certainty about how long their restore points will remain on their system.
Just ... why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Always remember that when someone who makes that sort of mistake while addressing something that is even worse, that it simply highlights the poor use of the English language overall. With that in mind, I feel it is better to encourage those who try to improve others, even if their own example may also have flaws. I don't claim to be perfect when it comes to the English language, but you should pick your battles when it comes to this sort of thing.
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" I could care less "
That does seem to be an Americanism. And to others it may appear as the opposite of what was intended.
I'm just grateful that Slashdot is a written medium, and so I don't have to hear the way our American brethren pronounce "niche".
Because regarding that bugbear of mine: I could care less.
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It's not an Americanism unfortunately. Most intelligent Americans are aware it's "couldn't", and I've heard plenty of dumber Brits say "could".
Supposedly there's been research done into it and it probably started when a sizable number of people heard the phrase rather than saw it written down, and misheard it because could and couldn't often sound roughly the same. That's lead to it being transcribed as such, and so, decades later, we see people writing it as that and others copying what's written.
See also
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Funny, haven't seen an ad in 11 Pro. Same install since I got and tossed new parts in this PC... just after 11 came out. I can also turn updates completely off, or to only notify me when they are available. Kind of like I have absolute control over the "hidden" settings. Like GPE. Or the Registry.
It's almost like the "I'm a cheap bastard and buy the absolute cheapest shit I can" (maybe, haven't seen it myself in Home on my dads laptop I have to admin), and "free" versions get ads.
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They are losing me as a 35 year user of Windows products. I am on my 3rd Linux installation now. They could care less about power users anymore. All they care about is the naive users with disposable income
Over this? You, as a power user need a system recovery too, that lets you roll back to a restore point more than 60 days ago?
Please, tell me all about your Linux distribution that supports rolling back your system to a restore point in the past, let alone over 60 days in the past?
Re:Just ... why? (Score:4, Informative)
Let's see:
Hmm. All of them. They require the user to have more than two brain cells to rub together to spark a thought, but there are tons of options. Some are integrated to Desktops / Package Managers and can be turned on to do automatic work too.
1: BTRFS / ZFS snapshots.
2: DD images
3: Simple tarballs
4: Haven't found a non-embedded Linux yet that doesn't support disk / partition cloning software, especially sparse file disk cloning so you clone only the actual data.
5: Did I mention FS snapshots yet? They are made specifically for this. And some are Enterprise Ready level of support.
6: Some package managers can be set up to be able to revert changes to pre update / install states too.
Any / all of these ways can be used with ANY age. Haven't changed much on that ZFS cold storage volume that you just fat fingered changing the permissions on? Who the fuck cares if the snapshot is 180 days old? Take a new snapshot, restore the old snapshot, and compare file differences sorted by something other than the fucked up perms... It's not rocket surgery.
Or store a snapshot just before you do any major changes like perms. Then it's an easy rollback to 5 mins ago. But you still have the option to use the 180 day old snapshot too.
Doesn't explain (Score:3)
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:Doesn't explain (Score:5, Funny)
What happened 60 days ago that Microsoft wants you to forget...
Re:Doesn't explain (Score:4, Funny)
What happened 60 days ago that Microsoft wants you to forget...
I can't remember. [ssl-images-amazon.com]
Re: Just ... why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed. This just shows that MS does not care about its users and that you cannot depend on Windows.
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Indeed. This just shows that MS does not care about its users and that you cannot depend on Windows.
Even if people don't like Apple products, why doesn't Windows have something like Time Machine? Backs up everything, Programs and all, saves incremental changes, and restoring is exceptionally simple. Time limits are related to the size of the hard drive. If a year isn't long enough, buy a bigger drive. Include or exclude files and directories.
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Why would you think it doesn't?
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Why would you think it doesn't?
This comes up every time. What is the Windoews program that restores every program and file on your computer?
I'll speak about Time Machine, everyone say "Windows has that." Then I ask what that program is. All programs, all parts. I've had to restore the whole thing a couple times. And don't say make a disk image. Hourly backups that way? What program does that in Windows?
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The simple truth is that Windows has no sane backup mechanisms. I looked at commercial options and found a heap of crap, like absence of verify capabilities. Personally, I now boot Linux and take sector-level images for the few cases I care. And for data, I put that into git and use the git client from cygwin.
Windows is a pathetic excuse for an OS, not something that fulfills minimal standards. But too many people have Stockholm Syndrome and cannot think anymore. T
90-day limit changes to 60-day limit (Score:5, Informative)
By default, Win11 creates an automatic restore point every 7 days, or when it detects an installation or update event. The previous default was to keep restore points for 90 days. This update reduces that to 60 days. Not a huge change.
With a 60 day limit on the change events and weekly triggers, you will probably have at least 10 restore points to choose from. If you feel weekly restore points are not frequent enough, you can add an event to the Task Scheduler to create them more often, limited by your assigned storage limit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I was concerned when I learned of the 60-day limit, until I found there was already a 90-day limit which didn't seem that restrictive. I'm OK with this.
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(fyi I like to reset my own system date to Sept 1, 1993, but ymmv)
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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?
Because unlike Slashdotters users don't actually want to use their operating system. It should just do a thing in the background and run the software that users actually care about. I have a better question for you: Why the heck would I as a user need to or want to manage an update backup process? I have better things to do with my time. If I wanted to waste my time screwing around and hand-holding an OS I'd run Linux.
Note: I actually do run Linux. I'm speaking for the 99% of people who are more normal than
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Windows Recall (Score:2)
Seriously, why should restore points have that kind of limit?
I suspect it's to free up disk space for the Windows Recall [wikipedia.org] feature that Microsoft is bringing back.
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Good thing for Snapshots (Score:2, Informative)
VM Snapshots are simpler to manage anyway.
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For sure!!!!!
Cynical me suspects an agenda (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Cynical me suspects an agenda (Score:5, Insightful)
^ 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 of other alternatives.
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It feels like 1984 all over again.
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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).
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You are trying to support the conspiracy theory of "Windows is turning into a subscription product!", in the same way Republicans keep telling people that Democrats are going to take their guns away, and that hasn't happened over the past 40 years.
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You are trying to support the conspiracy theory of "Windows is turning into a subscription product!", in the same way Republicans keep telling people that Democrats are going to take their guns away, and that hasn't happened over the past 40 years.
Well Microsoft Office turned into a subscription product and that is kinda the same thing.
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That is not for lack of trying.
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Republicans keep telling people that Democrats are going to take their guns away, and that hasn't happened over the past 40 years.
I mean... despite the Bruen decision, states have been doubling down on gun control over the last several years, so forgive us if we don't believe that yellow stuff coming out of your dick and landing on us is rain.
System Restore Is a Hack (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:System Restore Is a Hack (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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All good points... which is why that's not how things work in the GNU/Linux world.
Libraries are explicitly versioned, with a traditional major.minor.point release format. Applications are free to pick what level of library they need, and library devs are encouraged to limit bug fixes to point bumps, and backward compatible features to minor bumps.
Most critically, the system is designed to allow multiple versions of a library to co-exist, and soft links are used to allow an application to load the latest ver
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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.
Can't / Don't want to. They are two different things. If you're aiming for a system with perfect uptime like on servers you may have different priorities than a system with user facing software that is predominantly focused on having a million poorly written pieces of software running in a consistent way.
Only yesterday someone posted something about Windows NT being unable to change an IP address without a reboot. That was not only wrong, it also ignored the philosophy of why a reboot was mandated: If you i
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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.
Can't / Don't want to. They are two different things. If you're aiming for a system with perfect uptime like on servers you may have different priorities than a system with user facing software
That is fundamentally wrong. First of all, both Unix and Windows are used as both workstations and servers, so it's obviously wrong. Second, and slightly less obviously but you're still wrong, you want this functionality on both desktops and servers.
In a world of DLL-hell it's not a question of having the ability to overwrite an in use file, it's a question of what state your system and the applications on it is in afterwards.
You're not selling it. You're saying that their system is so deficient that they have to have it be deficient in another way.
You're asking them to solve a problem they philosophically don't care about,
Uptime? Yeah, we already know Microsoft doesn't care about that. Windows has detected you have moved the mouse, reboot required.
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Microsoft failed several times at filesystem creation. That is why they are still on ancient NTFS. Meanwhile Linux ...
Its like i have a crystal ball (Score:2)
FreeBSD (Score:2)
I've been experimenting more and more lately w/ FreeBSD as a desktop OS on a number of machines.
You know what FreeBSD has natively and used by default? OpenZFS.
Do you know how many years worth of ZFS snapshots I have on some of my machines? Many MANY years worth. They're created when -I- want them. They're destroyed when -I- want that to happen. I can inspect their state and contents at will. I'm in total and complete control over MY storage.
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It is a universal constant that when I have a machine, I want to tell it what to do, and I want it to do that.
I don't want it running off doing stuff I don't need it to, nor telling me what I can or can't do, especially when the restrictions are arbitrary and non-technical.
I've already decided at this point that my next machines won't be Windows. I ran Slackware as a primary desktop for 10 years, I'm not scared of it at all... and it did what I asked it to do. But even Linux has systemd nonsense that brea
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The purpose of an OS is to get the hell out of my way and do what I told it to do. Windows increasingly does the opposite.
I've said it for years, but apparently Microsoft thinks that the purpose of computers is only to run the OS, and those other things aren't important at all.
The only groups who benefit from Windows are those for whom Windows is job security, fixing things that in a good OS - just work.
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You know what FreeBSD has natively and used by default? OpenZFS.
OpenZFS works fine on Linux. That it's not in the kernel tree is not a practical problem. I can build both the kernel and OpenZFS myself any time I want.
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It does reduce its user friendliness somewhat if you have to build it to install it, though IIRC under Debian simply installing it is enough to get that part working. I can't remember if there was issue booting from ZFS.
(Personally I prefer btrfs + md + LVM - it's not that it's "better", it's just those three seem to be better integrated and do not involve learning new ways to mount file systems etc. Having a file system manage its own mounting seems kludgy to me. But I do wish btrfs, md, and LVM could actu
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It does reduce its user friendliness somewhat if you have to build it to install it, though IIRC under Debian simply installing it is enough to get that part working. I can't remember if there was issue booting from ZFS.
I only had to build ZFS myself because I wanted to build a newer kernel myself, and the version of ZFS bundled with Devuan stable didn't support it.
I did have to install the system manually myself because the Devuan installer didn't support root on ZFS at the time, and I'm not sure if it does now either. However, I was able to do that mostly just by following the instructions on the OpenZFS home page. I needed to make a few tweaks for sysvinit instead of systemd, but they were not very complicated changes,
You Must Not Turn Back on Enshitification!!! (Score:2)
useless (Score:2)
Restore points for me have turned out to be useless. Either windows deleted them without my say-so and without exceeding alloted space, or restore point fails when restore is attempted. It is much safer to use 3rd party backup where they actually care about their customers, sometimes even providing support.
CA District Attorney Should Investigate Microsoft (Score:1)