[Sithtiger]

I have a problem with System Restore only keeping restore points 5 days back at the most. So for example, the oldest restore point I have currently is from September 6, 2007. I've had this Vista x64 install for around a month now. I should have restore points dating back to about August 1st or so.

I've got plenty of HD space too......around 500GB free I believe so that's not an issue. I don't have any viruses. I bet this is an easy fix, it's just that I don't know what that is. Vista is supposed to automatically make restore points every day doesn't it? According to this post at this site, Vista is supposed to save restore points for around 136 years. http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread82418.html

While I don't need it that long, I'd like it save them for around 6 months to a year or even whatever the default is supposed to be. I had a problem with a Windows update about a month ago. I think it was a security update or something. Anyway, I don't know which one or why, but it borked my system and I couldn't even boot, not even in Safe Mode. So I put the Vista x64 DVD in and went to use System Restore and I didn't have any restore points. I had no other choice than to reinstall Windows. I just want to know why it's doing this and how I can stop it before I have to use System Restore again and I have to reinstall again.

Thanks in advance!

[cuttlefish]

You're not runnig any reg cleaners applications are you as they have a nasty habit of also wipng out the Vista restore points!!!

[Rollin' Rog]

5 days?

Make sure you have checked the box to show points greater than 5 days


A corrupt archive can cause any number of problems. The best solution for the future when you encounter any System Restore issues is to turn off system protection, reboot and turn it back on again.

Yes that will delete all points -- but if you are not saving new ones -- little is lost by trying.

[Sithtiger]

Originally Posted by cuttlefish

You're not runnig any reg cleaners applications are you as they have a nasty habit of also wipng out the Vista restore points!!!

In fact I am using reg cleaners....3 different ones. TuneUp Utilities 2007's reg cleaner and the the free reg cleaner called Wise Registry Cleaner and finally TweakNow's Powerpack 2006's reg cleaner. However, I've checked my Restore Points previously and I don't believe any of them affected the Restore Points. I suspected them originally too at first.

One that I haven't checked is my disk defragger, Perfect Disk. Someone posted this link from another forum: http://bertk.mvps.org/html/missingrpv.html

I don't know for sure if it's Perfect Disk, but I'll check the next time I go to defrag, beforehand and then after it's done and I reboot.

[Sithtiger]

Originally Posted by Rollin' Rog

5 days?

Make sure you have checked the box to show points greater than 5 days


A corrupt archive can cause any number of problems. The best solution for the future when you encounter any System Restore issues is to turn off system protection, reboot and turn it back on again.

Yes that will delete all points -- but if you are not saving new ones -- little is lost by trying.

Make sure the restore points are being saved on the drive that has the space available.

Thanks, yeah that's with the box checked to show older checkpoints....I wish that was the problem, but hopefully it's my disk defragger. I'll have to test it out to find out. If that pans out fine, I'll also test my reg cleaners just to make 100% sure. I believe I tested them before, but I can't say for certain that I did test all of them. The only thing is though, is that I haven't used the reg cleaners in at least 2 weeks and it's still cutting off restore points, so I'm thinking....hoping it's my defragger.

[Sithtiger]

OK, well I finally got around to using Perfect Disk and I've confirmed that it's the culprit. Diskeeper was doing the same thing too. Prior to running Perfect Disk, I had 9 Restore Points saved. Then I ran PD and it wanted to do a boot time defrag and I agreed and after it finished, all my restore points were gone.

This is OK since my system is running flawlessly right now, but what I want to know is how can I program PD to stay away from the Restore Points?

Thanks for all your help. At least I know the cause, so the problem is 50% solved IMO. I know I could simply uninstall PD, but that's not a real fix since Diskeeper does this too. There's got to be a way to work around this.

[Rollin' Rog]

Well I have PerfectDisk as well.

I ran it and can confirm that it did indeed delete the few restore points I had that were older than 5 days.

PerfectDisk is supposed to exclude System Restore points, but apparently it only protects the last 5 days.

I had some conversation with their support about "metadata" files, and this was his response:

These files are System Restore points. They are now
specifically
excluded by PerfectDisk due to a bug that Raxco discovered and
reported
to MS in volsnap.sys (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932790).
As a
workaround until Microsoft fixes this bug in volsnap, PD
specifically
excludes these files. This was an emergency workaround as the
bug in
volsnap could result in data corruption and loss of the drive.
Since it
was an emergency workaround, doc wasn't updated and we didn't
have time
to come to a decision on whether these files should be
reported/included
in the fragmentation statistics.

Also the program erroneously suggests page file defragamentation -- even though there is nothing to defragment if a system managed page file is being used -- because it is recreated each reboot.

[Sithtiger]

Thanks Rollin' Rog! Well for me, it deleted all my restore points. Yeah I noticed that PD wanted to defrag my Pagefile too. It thought it was odd since it did that a little over a week ago and I hadn't added much since then.

So I'm confused as to what to do. Is there some type of update that I need to download from Raxco because they said that these files are automatically excluded by PD now.

I checked and I'm running the latest version of PerfectDisk which is version 8.0 build 64. Fortunately I'm in no need of needing to restore Vista and I created a manual restore point after PD ran, but still. You never know when something might go wrong or you forget to create a restore point and something happens and then you're screwed because you happened to run PD or Diskeeper (it does this too....if you had it installed instead of PerfectDisk).

That's what happened to me a few weeks ago. I'm not sure what happened exactly but as I stated in my first post, a security update screwed up Windows. I had forgotten but I had just defragged prior to the update. The odd thing though, is that Windows is supposed to automatically create a restore point every time it reboots right? Also, before a driver update or a Windows update. Well it didn't and when I tried to restore it to a previous state, it had nothing to restore from. Needless to say, I wasn't pleased at having to format and reinstall Vista for the 2nd time in a month....I had just built this computer too.

So, now that we know the PD is getting rid of restore points and Raxco says what it's doing to avoid this.....how do we update PD so that we can protect our restore points as well? Again, thanks allot Rollin' Rog!!

[Rollin' Rog]

I sent a contact/support email to Raxco -- and they responded very promptly.

From what I can tell they don't seem to be aware of this issue or know what's up either.

I'm going to respond with a link to this thread just so they can see it's obviously not just me. You can contact them yourself through their support page -- and that might be an extra goose for them.

This was their response for now:

Hi Roger,



Thanks for contacting Raxco support.



PerfectDisk does not move system restore files so I’m not sure how this is related to PerfectDisk.



Due to a bug that Raxco discovered in volsnap.sys (a component of Windows Vista) that can potentially cause the loss of the drive, Raxco as a workaround excludes the System Volume Information folder - where Restore Points are stored. So currently these files are excluded from the defrag on Windows XP x64, Windows 2003 and Vista x86/x64. Right now only Windows XP x86 and windows 2000 can defrag the system restore files.



There is no timeframe yet from Microsoft on when they expect to resolve and release an update for this issue but once they do then we will release the lock on the system restore files so eventually all of the files will be defragmented.



http://www.raxco.com/support/windows...s.cfm?kbid=601



Please let me know if you have additional questions.



Regards,



Susie Colon-Solis

Raxco Software Support

By the way, my test did not involve a "boot time" run of PD (I neglected to mention this to them) -- just a standard run -- and I checked before rebooting.

edit 2

Well, I'll say one thing for Raxco -- NO vendor tech support has ever responded faster than they do :)

Here is the last response:

Hi Roger,

PerfectDisk will not move the restore files.

What might be occurring is the shadow copy service logs all of
the
changes to the drive and if there are a lot of movements then it
can run
out of space and therefore it will delete shadow copies.

Although the link below says 2003 this can occur with any
machine that
uses shadow copy.

http://www.raxco.com/support/windows...s.cfm?kbid=504

Regards,

Susie Colon-Solis
Raxco Software Support

I replied that if this is the case I should also expect to see it when running the built in MS Defrag.

I will have to build up some restore dates to test.

You might try the same as well.

Checking my EventViewer for errors during the time of the defrag there were none.

However there were 5 or 6 "informational" Volsnap events of this nature:

Log Name: System
Source: volsnap
Date: 9/17/2007 2:33:28 AM
Event ID: 33
Task Category: None
Level: Information
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: RollinRog-PC
Description:
The oldest shadow copy of volume C: was deleted to keep disk space usage for shadow copies of volume C: below the user defined limit.

I would say there is a definite relationship here :rolleyes:

Found this:

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/arc...ows-vista.aspx

Ran it and on my system it reported:

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{2c3a777e-e88c-11db-a1
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{2c3a7
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 4.714 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 4.938 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 5.103 GB

So it appears I am definitely space limited here. Of course this is only a 40 gig drive, one of two that came with the low end Acer Desktop system.

[Sithtiger]

Thanks, well I've got plenty of space...I've got a 500GB HD (with 465GB usable and 415GB free) so I've got plenty of space. I remember I previously checked Event Viewer and I too had some informational messages about Volsnap.sys.

Here's the info that my system shows from using the vssadmin list shadowstorage command:

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C: )\\?\Volume{0081b4a5-4b04-11dc-b560-806e6f6e6963}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C: )\\?\Volume{0081b4a5-4b04-11dc-b560-806e6f6e69
63}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.363 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 3.418 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 69.864 GB

So it looks like to me, space isn't an issue wouldn't you say. It's got to be some error that MS is probably going to have to patch. I'm a little bit surprised that they haven't already actually.

[Rollin' Rog]

Well it would certainly seem so.

I'm afraid "Susie" may be waffling a bit here, now replying that:

Hi Roger,

PerfectDisk processes more files during the defrag so it may not
occur
with the built in. The built in will only defragment files if
there is
enough contiguous free space to place it in one piece. It will
not clean
up fragmented free space. If there is not enough contiguous free
space
then the file is skipped and there is no change to the disk.

PerfectDisk optimizes files according to modification date,
consolidates
free space and defragments files so it is changing the file
structure a
lot more than windows would.

In any case, this is caused by a lot of disk changes not
PerfectDisk in
particular. Any program that makes a lot of changes to the disk
can have
the same effect on system restore.

>>

Well, if that's the case then PD needs to post a wassup on this and offer a different methodology of defragmentation.

If the built-in defrag does not cause this, but PD (or any other defrag uitlity) does -- then there is a problem with the method.

In my case PD did not even report that the drive needed defragmenting -- so it really shouldn't have had that much to do.

>> I'd give the built-in defrag a test on this at the first opportunity.

[Sithtiger]

In response to the reply to you from PD.....WHAT?!? Maybe it's just me but it sounds like she didn't even answer the question. While what she said was probably true, that doesn't explain why it still wipes the restore points. They said that it shouldn't be doing this, but we know that it does.

I'll try the built-in defrag as well. I can't imagine it would have the same problem. It's kind of like reg cleaners for Vista x64. Many of them would get hung up on the Wow64 key and basically get caught in a loop. So it would take around 8 hours to do a registry sweep. Most of them have fixed this problem now, but it looks like the same sort of a problem with defraggers. I don't know if it's Vista x32 and x64 or just Vista x64.

[Rollin' Rog]

If it's true, it answers the question (the restore points are associated with the space available to volume shadow copy which she is suggesting is maxed out and overwritten under certain circumstances) -- but puts the ball back in any 3rd party application that uses such an aggressive and resource intensive method to accomplish a defrag.

It is unacceptable. They can't just blame MS -- it's something they have to acknowledge and work around.

Moreover I don't think XP has this problem even though she is suggesting it should apply there. I have PD installed on XP and believe I have run it atleast once -- with no problem with restore points.

[Sithtiger]

The thing is though, that's not what is happening with me. I have plenty of space as you saw, and yet it still did it, so it must be a problem within PD itself. I'm sure they'll fix it one way or another. I'm just glad I know what the problem is now.

[ghayes]

Here's what is going on. When defragmenting with PerfectDisk and Smart Placement (default defrag method), PD is not only defragmenting files, it is also consolidating free space, placing boot files, and grouping files together by modification date. When the built-in defragmenter is defragmenting, it is doing far less work. VSS is detecting the drive changes generated by PD as changes and as a result older restore points/shadow copies get purged. If you have PD defragment using the Defragment Only option, PD essentially works like the built-in defragmenter - simply defragmenting fragmented files - no free space consolidation, no boot file placement, no grouping of files.

VSS does have code in it to detect defrag activity and limit purging restore points/shadow copies (MS KB article). However, that code only works if the cluster size on the drive is a multiple of 16k. The default cluster size on Vista is 4k. Why not 16k if it will limit the impact that defragmenting can have on the life our your restore points/shadow copies? Because NTFS compression doesn't work for cluster sizes greater than 4k.

The first time that you defragment with PerfectDisk using Smart Placement will result in the most changes to the drive (as seen by vss) and when it is most likely that restore points/shadow copies may be purged. It all depends on the amount of work that PD is doing, how much total free space there is on the drive, how much space that restore points/shadow copies take, etc... Subsequent defrag passes should result in less changes to the disk and less likelyhood that restore points/shadow copies will be purged.

- Greg/Raxco Software
Microsoft MVP 2003-2007
Windows File Systems

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.