Cannot open System restore - Unexpected error in the property page

dalchina · 12 Feb 2020

Good thing you had backups for your backups, so to speak.

Can you also now access Safe Mode or is that still an issue?

You will probably know System Restore- when it restores- is great, but can simply fail to complete restoring.

Registry backup of course isn't the same thing- perhaps most useful in the occasional scenario when a PC can't boot because of registry corruption. I found MS killed off Regback (registry backups) around the end of 1709- there is a way of enabling that again, posted on the forum. But a major upgrade could be expected to disable that.

Tweaking.com (e.g.) offers a registry backup tool with scheduling.

jumanji · 12 Feb 2020

Actually, the AOMEI backup restore worked for the first time but I saw only C: was unlocked. D: E: F: G: and H: remained encrypted and locked. I could not access those. I unlocked all those locked drives by inputting the recovery keys.After that some repeated notification appeared as to whether I want to turn off encryption for those drives and I said yes. After doing that, when I restarted all trouble began.Thereafter that Image restore would not succeed.( When it worked, after unlocking D: I had pulled out two excel sheets which I had not backed up. )

On hindsight, I think I should have decrypted all the drives before running the image restore. As for Paragon it encountered all decrypted drives while restoring its image and succeeded.

I had never tried Safe Mode till now. There was no occasion to do it.

As for system restore, I would have done atleast 20 system restores since 25 Dec 19 and at no time it failed. ( I only had to remember to turn Malwarebytes and McAfee Live offline before restoring)

Megahertz · 12 Feb 2020

jumanji, Can it be that those issues were due to Optane?

Bitlocker is a good security tool, but I had seen may people that lost all their data.

My suggestion is to make at least one disk image with Bitlocker and Optane turned off.

Pejole2165 · 12 Feb 2020

I have a thread in these forums all about Optane and creating system images/ backups and bitlocker with an Optane enabled system.
Long story short, if doing anything outside Windows, disable Optane first.
If messing with partitions or bitlocker, disable Optane first.
If making a disk image (system drive) disable Optane first.
The Optane system works by copying system files to the cache to improve boot times, when you make a system image those files are in effect lost as disk imaging apps do not image the Optane drive.
When restoring the image the files on disk may not match the files on the Optane cache and issues present themselves.

jumanji · 12 Feb 2020

Megahertz said:

jumanji, Can it be that those issues were due to Optane?

Bitlocker is a good security tool, but I had seen may people that lost all their data.

My suggestion is to make at least one disk image with Bitlocker and Optane turned off.

I can say for sure that the issues were not due to Optane. All the images I had taken were with Optane enabled and I have been able to successfully restore the images. I believe that the issues I encountered were principally due to my not decrypting the drives prior to imaging them and / or disabling encryption ( unlocking those) after restoring the image.

The Device Encryption that comes with all editions of Windows 10 ( including home when supported by the device) is a trimmed-down version of the Standard Bitlocker. It is not Password managed. The user can only turn the encryption off or on.All the visible drives on the system disk are encrypted. When turned on a recovery key is generated and stored in the device. If there is a need to unlock one has to use the Recovery key to unlock. One can download the keys and save it on another media. Even if one hasn't done that, the keys are available in his Microsoft account which can be accessed and downloaded from any PC.

I have used both Paragon Hard Disk Manager and AOMEI Backupper to take images. Paragon won't image an encrypted drive. It requires one to unlock it with password (for Standard Bitlocker) or the the recovery key ( for Device encryption) to image it. I feel the decrypting beforehand is best.

I found that AOMEI backupper could image the encrypted drive. When doing that it resorts to sector by sector imaging and the resulting image is very large. The very first system image I took immediately after setting up the PC is 72GB. ( system Image consisting of 1.ESD 650MB 2. OS C: 916.5 GB and 3. Win RE Tools 990MB ) The current version 5.6 states
"Optimized the backup method for a BitLocker partition: the program will no longer backup a BitLocker-encrypted partition with sector-by-sector after being encrypted. Fixed issue: file system damaged after restoring a BitLocker-encrypted partition to original location."

That reinforces my belief that decrypting beforehand is best. ( I had created the Recovery drive for factory reset and so I don't think I will ever restore this image)

Pejole2165 said:

I have a thread in these forums all about Optane and creating system images/ backups and bitlocker with an Optane enabled system.
Long story short, if doing anything outside Windows, disable Optane first.
If messing with partitions or bitlocker, disable Optane first.
If making a disk image (system drive) disable Optane first.
The Optane system works by copying system files to the cache to improve boot times, when you make a system image those files are in effect lost as disk imaging apps do not image the Optane drive.
When restoring the image the files on disk may not match the files on the Optane cache and issues present themselves.

I don't think it is necessary. From what I have read, the optane memory is dynamic. True that it stores the reference points in the last unallocated space of 9MB+ but it works dynamically. If it doesn't find it matches the original location, it finds and caches the relevant data and writes the new reference point in the unallocated space. The system may slow down a bit when it makes the readjustment but it is far more better and bearable than disabling the optane memory which is a painfully slow process. During the initial days I found that it stays put at 0 preparing the drive . I used to think it has frozen and close the program. After shutting down or restarting it will run again automatically.. After many such shutdowns and restarts I found that it has been disabled. Then one day I started disable and walked away. It took half an hour to complete the process.

All my images taken either from within Windows or outside with WinPe recovery pen drives ( most of the time) are taken with optane running and I haven't noticed any problems when the image is restored. The first start after restoring the image takes a little more time may be a minute or two more and the first access to any programs are also a little slow but that is bearable than waiting for half an hour and more for optane to offload.. It catches up within a few restarts and usage. The same process happens when the memory is full. It will slow down your PC a bit until it discards the old data and takes in any new data. This in any case is my personal opinion and that which I follow.