Microsoft Sets New 60-Day Limit For System Restore Points In Windows 11 Update (extremetech.com) 21
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)
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: (Score:2, Funny)
What happened 60 days ago that Microsoft wants you to forget...
Re: (Score:3)
What happened 60 days ago that Microsoft wants you to forget...
I can't remember. [ssl-images-amazon.com]
Re: Just ... why? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. This just shows that MS does not care about its users and that you cannot depend on Windows.
90-day limit changes to 60-day limit (Score:2)
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
Good thing for Snapshots (Score:2, Informative)
VM Snapshots are simpler to manage anyway.
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: (Score:3)
^ 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: (Score:2)
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).
System Restore Is a Hack (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:System Restore Is a Hack (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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:1)
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.