Running Macrium destroys System Restore points

Disagree with your assessment that System Restore points are unreliable.

I personally have never had an issue.

Case in point -

Create a restore point before installing a new app, or making a config change.

If that goes sideways, rolling back from a restore point gets you quickly back to where you were, without overwriting any personal data, which recovering from a disk image would do.

Doing a disk image for one app install or one config change is overkill.

It's choosing the right tool for the right purpose.

It's like complaining that a screwdriver isn't a hammer.

Two entirely different uses.

Begs the question why they are reliable for some, and not others.

I know that System Restore had issues on Windows 7 and prior when certain 3rd party AV programs were running.

The solution was when SR issued the restart notice, to instead boot into Safe Mode.

SR would then complete.

Then, rebooting normally from Safe Mode, the rollback was in effect.

No disabling or uninstalling of the AV was required.

Maintenance is certainly a part of a healthy system.

dalchina said:

There are enough threads reporting issues using System Restore on restoration failures to justify the viewpoint of it not being completely robust.

That would need to be supported by evidence that it was System Restore itself, and not something interfering with System Restore.

Without root cause, it's just opinion.

If you actually read some of the articles in the search results for AppxStaging, the issue was identified as the WindowsApps folder, not System Restore.

One, from MajorGeeks -

Almost always we have found that there's a problem with the WindowsApps folder that can cause numerous issues with System Restore.

Terrypin said:

Before installing Macrium my restore points remained intact for as long as I wished or until storage capacity was reached, which was a matter of MONTHS. After installing Macrium they are all now destroyed every week when Macrium makes its scheduled full image. I simply want to know how to fix that.

I think you were given the explanation back in January on the Macrium forum -

Could Macrium be a possible cause of my System Restore points disappearing?

"So if you started a backup job and then wrote a ton of data to the partition while the job was running, the size of that temporary snapshot could grow to the point that some or even all of your permanent snapshots that are used for System Restore points have to be deleted in order to keep the total size of your snapshots within the configured quota on the partition"

It helps to have an undertanding of Volume Shadow Copies -

What you should know about Volume Shadow Copy/System Restore in Windows 7 & Vista (FAQ) << Hope This Helps

Particularly, see the section "What happens when VSC runs out of space?"

Open an elevated (Run as Administrator) Command prompt, copy/paste and run the following command -

vssadmin list shadowstorage

This will show you how much is Used, Allocated, and what the Maximum space is set at.

You may simply have to increase the Maximum.