I showed your email to one of our developers and asked him to respond. I'll
paraphrase his response below and I hope to add it to our blog as well. You
ask very good questions, but like you might guess, there is a good reason
why System Restore works the way it does.
The job of System Restore is to bring the system state (registry, WMI, COM+
etc) and _all_ executables back to exactly the state at the time of the
restore point. Programs and drivers (including spyware) can be "installed"
just about anywhere, including your own personal folders. However, we have
no way of knowing whether an executable was installed, simply downloaded, or
there for some other reason. When you run System Restore, we restore all
"interesting" files on all protected volumes. On Vista, interesting files
are defined by monitored extensions outside of Windows, and everything under
Windows.
Here is the list of monitored extensions for XP:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...extensions.asp,
for Vista we added couple new extensions, but basically it is the same since
Millennium.
System Restore is big hammer, but this is what most of the people would
like. It's designed to help out situations like "My system used to work
yesterday, my cousin installed something from a web site and now everything
is broken. Please make it exactly as it was yesterday."
If you are more interested in selective removals of executables, you can try
uninstalling the application. If you still want to use use System Restore
but keep some executables, you can go to the previous version of the parent
folder on the undo snapshot and copy back the file in question.
By the way, exactly the opposite artifact exists as well: if there was a
download captured on the restore point, which later turned to be garbage and
deleted by the user, when we restore to that specific restore point, we are
going to resurrect the unnecessary file. because we have no way of knowing
the fact it is unnecessary.
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Want to learn more about Windows Server file and storage technologies? Visit
our team blog at
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/default.aspx.
"JewelsH" <> wrote in message
news:0E5B273D-02E5-43CD-BB87-...
> After reading the blogs and the system restore faqs, I still don't
> understand
> why system restore would delete a file that was sitting in my user
> documents
> folder. But I guess that means that a person would have to rename all
> executables that Vista may be hunting down to destroy. Deleting the
> installed program files I understand. I knew that it did that. But going
> after files that the user has put in a personal folder seems like
> overkill.
>
> Still not understanding this behavior. How are users supposed to protect
> themselves against this behavior? How am I going to know which files I
> have
> to protect against Vista's restore behavior?
>
> "JewelsH" wrote:
>
>> I'm sorry but I don't ever recall that happening in XP. And I don't
>> quite
>> understand why it would target the downloaded files. There are many
>> reasons
>> why a person would want to use system restore and not necessarily because
>> of
>> downloaded exes. I used it because I had made some changes based on
>> some
>> suggestions in these forums and couldn't go back on the changes. I'll
>> have
>> to look at the blogs to try to understand that reason. All traces of AVG
>> were removed eccept the link to the download. I had the downloaded
>> freeAVG
>> exe to install it and search couldn't find any trace of AVG except the
>> link
>> to the beta download. Even after I re-downloaded the beta install file,
>> a
>> search couldn't find the file that was on my desktop. I know MS doesn't
>> support AVG but how did it selectively get rid of all traces except that
>> link? In a prior post I made, I mentioned how I used an external hd to
>> copy
>> some data files to. When I went to get them from the ext. hd, I couldn't
>> many of the files.
>>
>> Thanks for the link to research this further.
>>
>> "Jill Zoeller [MSFT]" wrote:
>>
>> > It is by design that System Restore removes new executables (added
>> > after the
>> > restore point creation). This is the same behavior as XP and
>> > Millennium.
>> > Check out the FAQ in the Help and Support. There is a question/answer
>> > called
>> > "What files are changed during a system restore?" that explains this.
>> >
>> > --
>> > This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
>> > rights.
>> >
>> > Want to learn more about Windows Server file and storage technologies?
>> > Visit
>> > our team blog at http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/default.aspx.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > "JewelsH" <> wrote in message
>> > news
EE5097D-2069-41CE-B691-...
>> > > Well, I've been having problems running both the free version of AVG
>> > > and
>> > > the
>> > > beta they put out to test with Vista. Both versions had trouble
>> > > loading
>> > > at
>> > > startup. The beta version keeps giving a kernel interface fault.
>> > >
>> > > On to the weird activity of Vista. I used a restore point of one
>> > > week
>> > > ago,
>> > > which was prior to the beta download. After I did the restore, the
>> > > downloaded AVG beta file disappeared from my pc. Restore is not
>> > > supposed
>> > > to
>> > > delete your files but it did. Then I restored to the current date
>> > > and
>> > > guess
>> > > what? The file is still not there. I did a search for grisoft on my
>> > > pc
>> > > and
>> > > all it found was the download page. When I clicked on that link in
>> > > the
>> > > search menu, it asked if I wanted to save the file and downloaded it.
>> > >
>> > > It's still bugging me because the only way that I can load the
>> > > resident
>> > > shield for AVG is to load it myself after everything is booted up and
>> > > with
>> > > Defender and UAC turned off. Anybody have any insight as to why AVG
>> > > beta
>> > > cannot load and what to do.
>> >
>> >
>> >