I noticed that pretty much all help pages suggest backing up settings and creating restore points before modifying your computer and thats a great suggestion but they don't suggest saving items, its always delete and then restore if you made a wrong choice. Why not save the items to a USB drive so you can return them if something gets awry?
Hi there -
Sure you can! As a matter of fact I do it all the time.
However, when you create a complete, restorable backup of your entire system it is the "whole enchilada" so to speak.
A mirror image of your computer in case of a disaster.
Just keep your USB drive "synced" with your latest files. Keep in mind that some USB drives fail so copies are good.
Hope this helps.
P.S. Restore Points don't always work the way you might think.
How to use System Restore on Windows 10 | Windows Central
You are referring to two different things.
- A "Restore point" saves Windows settings and restoring it can restore Windows to the state it was in when the Restore point was made [if it works, Restore points are notoriously unreliable]. There is no "item" to save to or restore from a USB that contains Windows settings.
- Saving files to a USB is saving files. Not creating Restore points. There are lots of methods of doing so.
Note that making a system image to an external drive is the most powerful backup you can make.
- I make a new one every month to capture the latest state of play of my computer.
- I back up my own files at least weekly. I backup many of them hourly. I backup some of them as soon as I amend them.
my ditty - File backup vs imaging, imaging utilities, backing up drivers [post #3] - TenForums
All the best,
Denis
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Yes, I was mentioning two different things but maybe I wasn't explanatory enough.
I meant that while editing and modifying your computer why not instead of deleting files, saving them to USB so that if you make the wrong tweak you wont need to return to a restore point, only replace the removed items
You can export individual registry settings and/ or whole hive branches to reg files that you can save elsewhere then, if wanting to revert, just merge the reg file to return the settings you changed to the original. This method is useful if for example you want to change default behaviour of certain apps or global Windows settings. You can also save backups of configuration files used by individual apps, such as game config files.
So there are several things you can do to retain original settings and restore them if you mess up or don't like the results, and if you are just modifying one or two items at a time this method is fine, depending on how well you can organise the backups.
When making broader changes to the behaviour of Windows, especially with driver changes and system level edits, it is so easy to break functionality of several components by modifying just one item or even brick your install irrecoverably, a system image is much more convenient to apply to get back to the starting point if/ when things go awry, having individual settings file backups is not much help if you don't have a working install to restore them to.
I would think that as people get more experience with modifying/ tweaking Windows and apps they probably understand the importance of having a reliable method of getting back to a pre modified version in case of problems occurring.
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