System Restore contains shadow copies of user data: HDD: YES, SSD: NO

Hello everyone,

TLDR: System restore points of system partitions do not contain any user data if its on an SSD drive.


I noticed that when creating system restore points of a system partition, no shadow copies of user data are created if they are on an SSD.
The shadow copy is created, but not listed under "Previous Versions".
If I access the shadow copy with 3rd party tools like "shadowcopyview" or "ShadowExplorer", I can restore changed files (bmp, txt...) - but these are then corrupt.

If, on the other hand, it is not a system drive, it works fine.
And the interesting thing: If the system drive is an HDD, it works fine too.

Has that always been the case?
Has Microsoft documented this behavior anywhere?

Thanks and greetings,
Martin

Hello mfessler,

After seeing your post, I used both 3rd party tools to restore a large (around 400 KB) and small (40 KB) text file as a test. The large recovered files had the correct size, but were corrupted while the small recovered files were fine. Both files were in my Desktop folder in the shadow copy file.

Hard to tell if the 3rd party tools are the issue or what. I suppose one could delete some test files off the drive, then do a Windows System Restore and see what the results are vs what the 3rd party tools recover.

Here someone tried to get help about this issue from MS and was told to contact the 3rd party software creators:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...c-83f289f8e2e0

If I access the shadow copy with 3rd party tools like "shadowcopyview" or "ShadowExplorer", I can restore changed files (bmp, txt...) - but these are then corrupt.

If, on the other hand, it is not a system drive, it works fine.
And the interesting thing: If the system drive is an HDD, it works fine too

Odd .

I have used such tools to restore entire os and user files.

Did you try z-vsscopy? Shadow Copy Explorer - manage & search - Z-DBackup