Windows 10 Automatic Maintenance ignoring my settings

Xirix · 26 Jan 2020

Windows 10 Pro 1909 (18363.592).

So I set my automatic maintenance to 8am as I will often be doing things in the night/early morning. For instance I record a podcast with some friends in america sometimes, and I'll be doing this between 1.30am to sometimes as late as 7am, so the default of 2am isn't good for me.

I did said podcast earlier, and I just checked maintenance and it said it ran at 4.30, while I was recording..., I in fact had multiple programs open, and two different recording programs up and recording, but my computer thought I was idle enough to start maintenance? What? I'm going to be very annoyed if that hour of maintenance desynced my audio from my peers and causes me more work in editing.

Also just as an aside, I couldn't find specific details, but apparently auto maintenance quote "gets rid of unused desktop icons" after 3 months of not being used, what does this mean? I have a lot of crap on my desktop that doesn't necessarily get used that often, is this going to randomly delete my files? Or does it specifically mean desktop shortcuts or something?

dalchina · 26 Jan 2020

Hi, I can understand your concern.

You may find the description of the time at which this runs here of interest:
Change Automatic Maintenance Settings in Windows 10

This suggests the task would not run if the computer is deemed 'busy'.

Also:
Specify Automatic Maintenance Time to Run in Windows 10
(Notice in the tutorials group policy is given first, the registry equivalent for Home follows).

This may be of interest:
View All Automatic Maintenance Tasks in Windows 10

whilst
Enable or Disable Scheduled System Maintenance in Windows
might be useful should you wish to ensure it is not run at some point.

From this:Potential issues checked by System Maintenance:

Broken shortcuts - Broken shortcuts are invalid references to programs and other resources. For example, a desktop shortcut for a USB device may be regarded as broken if the USB device is not connected when the System Maintenance troubleshooter performs its maintenance. When there are more than 4 broken shortcuts on the desktop, then all broken shortcuts on the desktop are removed.
Troubleshooting history is taking up disk space - Frees up disk space by removing troubleshooting history logs older than 1 month.
System time is incorrectly set - Sets the correct system time and synchronize system clock with the time server. When the system time is set incorrectly, features that rely on time measurement such as Product Activation, malware scanners, and browser certificates might not work correctly.
Unused desktop icons - Icons and shortcuts on the desktop that have been unused in 3 months are removed.
Disk volume errors - Frees up disk space by repairing hard disk volume errors such as bad sectors, lost clusters, cross-linked files and directory errors. These problems can cause the file system to report incorrect volume details and occupy excessive disk space.
Error reports are taking up disk space - Frees up disk space by removing error reports and logs older than 1 month.

This may be of interest on stopping shortcut removal, although the final comment suggests it isn't effective.
Preventing Windows from automatically removing broken desktop shortcuts - Super User