System Restore being deleted. Bad setting?

[David12846]

Greetings.
I have Windows 7 Home Premium. My restore points are deleted every few days. I'm pretty sure it is not a virus. My system protection Current Usage with 1 set of restore points is 4.61 GB. Maximum Usage is 20% (182 GB). Probably overkill, but someone said to increase the max.

Event viewer occasionally shows: "The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because of insufficient paged heap.". I don't want Shadow Copies of my documents but I was told I need it for System Restore. Do I need to use Shadow Copy in order to retain my Restore points?

Under Services.msc:

• 
  "Volume Shadow Copy" is set to "Automatic".
  I just noticed that "Windows Backup" is set to "Manual". Should this be set to "Automatic"?

I have read elsewhere that my Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space might be too small. I ran "vssadmin list shadowstorage" from the command prompt and it said:

• 
  Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 4.616 GB (0%)
  Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 5.931 GB (0%)
  Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 182.892 GB (20%)

I also read my Registry needs an RPLifeInterval value in the SystemRestore group. RPLifeInterval is not listed. I've read that RPLifeInterval is for Windows XP, but other places say it is needed for Windows 7 also.

Some have said defrag will remove Restore points. My Windows 7 automatically defrags every few days. I do not use a 3rd party defrag. Others have said googleupdater will remove Restore points too. I do not use Chrome but I have google things in my browser toolbar.

Knowledge is good... but it can be very dangerous too. I hope someone can guide me.

Thanks - David

 

[LukeFatwalker]

"Some have said defrag will remove Restore points. My Windows 7 automatically defrags every few days. I do not use a 3rd party defrag. Others have said googleupdater will remove Restore points too."

^^This

 

[David12846]

Night Owl - I take it to mean defrag and/or googleupdater might be the cause of my restore points disappearing.

A few days after your post I set defrag to manual instead of automatic. I think I also removed everything google related. I then manually set a restore point.

A day later my restore points were still there.

I allowed Windows to do an update, and 2 additional sets of restore points were created. I then had 3 sets of restore points (my manually created one, and 2 sets due to a Windows update)

The following day, the restore point I manually created had vanished. Only the 2 sets created due to the Windows update were available.

Today, I noticed the 2 sets created by Windows update are gone, but sometime in the wee hours of the morning when I was asleep the system automatically created a set of restore points.

I'm sure something is still removing old restore points. Since I've had 3 sets of restore points at one time, I doubt Windows deleted the restore points due to a lack of space.

 

[David12846]

Grrr. Today I have no restore points.

The only error in "Event View>>System Logs>>System" in the last 24 hours was "volsnap". The Event Properties said:

Event ID: 15
The description said: "The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because of insufficient paged heap."

 

[LukeFatwalker]

Night Owl - I take it to mean defrag and/or googleupdater might be the cause of my restore points disappearing.

A few days after your post I set defrag to manual instead of automatic. I think I also removed everything google related. I then manually set a restore point.

A day later my restore points were still there.

I allowed Windows to do an update, and 2 additional sets of restore points were created. I then had 3 sets of restore points (my manually created one, and 2 sets due to a Windows update)

The following day, the restore point I manually created had vanished. Only the 2 sets created due to the Windows update were available.

Today, I noticed the 2 sets created by Windows update are gone, but sometime in the wee hours of the morning when I was asleep the system automatically created a set of restore points.

I'm sure something is still removing old restore points. Since I've had 3 sets of restore points at one time, I doubt Windows deleted the restore points due to a lack of space.

It's a sad state of affairs for Windows System Restore. Almost any issue it's meant to restore from can corrupt it's data, and even standard procedures (defrag as an example) wipes the data.

If you're having this issue, the best advice I could give is to replace WSR with a 3rd party alternative like Rollback Rx, AX64, or Comodo Time Machine.