an inquiry on system restore point?

Pathfinder · 28 Jan 2017

any way to create a system restore point -not on the pc but externally? -perferbaley my large capacity external hdd

TairikuOkami · 28 Jan 2017

You can use AOMEI Backupper Standard or RollBack Rx Home rather than the obsolete system restore.

Berton · 28 Jan 2017

I use a little "trick" from windows 7 - Increase automatic System Restore points to more than just once a week? - Super User and created a Shortcut/icon on my Desktop to do just that. I haven't dug into whether I could do it storing on a different drive. Other suggestions found here:
Create Restore Point Only once per day at DuckDuckGo

Bree · 29 Jan 2017

Have you tried looking for the system restore points on your PC's hard drive? Ever found them?

No, I thought not. Apparently they are stored in the (hidden and 'access denied') 'System Volume Information' folder - so, no, there's probably no way to move that to another drive.

There is only one situation where Microsoft does create a system restore point on another drive but it's not exactly the answer you were looking for. If you have used Backup & Restore to create a system image on an external drive, you can run System Restore and tick the 'show more restore points' box. It will then, in addition to the locally stored restore points, list the one stored with each system image. You can restore one of these just as you would a local one.

dalchina · 29 Jan 2017

Pathfinder said:

any way to create a system restore point -not on the pc but externally? -perferbaley my large capacity external hdd

Just wondering why you'd want to do that?

A System restore point secures a limited set of changes to the registry, drivers, system files, installed programs etc..
The disk space used is carefully controlled and limited.
There seems little point in keeping the restore points for a Windows partition elsewhere.
Restoration sometimes fails for obscure reasons.

As commented by others, the routine use of disk imaging is much more complete, far more robust and far better supported.

Berton · 29 Jan 2017

Bree said:

Have you tried looking for the system restore points on your PC's hard drive? Ever found them?

No, I thought not. Apparently they are stored in the (hidden and 'access denied') 'System Volume Information' folder - so, no, there's probably no way to move that to another drive.

You are right about where the files are, just did a new one about 10 minutes ago and checking the date and time when that Folder was changed confirmed that is the location. One might be able to copy the files for storage elsewhere but probably would have to put them back before doing a restore, could get complicated. Regedit has an Export feature in File that can create the file in a different location, for testing just did mine, about 338MB in size and put it on the D:/DATA partition.

If one wants to see all the IE temp files go to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache, You'll have to change the Folder to to show Protected Operating System files but be sure to set it back.