How to Create and Use System Restore Point on Windows 10

Windows offers a handy System Restore feature that takes a snapshot of your PC’s software, registry settings, and particular program files at a specific point in time, better known as a restore point. Usually, it helps to restore your PC when a major system change or installation of a system update, driver or application goes wrong.

Whenever things go wrong, you can use these restore points to revert your PC to previous state. Essentially, you will be able to undo bad changes made to your system. This article will explain how to activate, create and use System Restore Point in Windows 10.

How to enable System Restore on Windows 10

As the System Restore feature is not pre-enabled on some computers, you must enable it first so that Windows can automatically create a System Restore point before making any change or adjustment to it. system scale. Here’s how.

Step 1: Open the Start menu, type restore and click on “Create a restore point”.

2nd step: In the System Properties window that opens, switch to the System Protection tab. Next, highlight the system drive (usually C 🙂 drive and click Configure.

Step 3: Select the option “Enable system protection”.

Here you can also use the slider under Disk Space Usage to specify the amount of storage to allocate for the system recovery function.

To note: Windows allocates 3-10% of storage space for system protection. Once this storage is full, it will delete previous restore points to store new ones.

If you want to create a new system restore point, you can also click the Delete button to remove all previously created restore points.

Step 4: Finally, click on Apply and then on OK.

And that’s about it. Now Windows will automatically create a restore point once a week. Moreover, it will also automatically create a restore point right before a major system update or major system changes.

Although this only activates system protection for the selected drive, you can repeat the process for the rest of the drives as well.

How to manually create a system restore point in Windows 10

While Windows automatically creates system restore points, you can also create one manually. This can come in handy when you are trying an early version or changing some unknown registry settings on your PC.

Now there are several ways to do this. The first is to use the System Properties window, while the second is to use the Command Prompt. Here are the two.

Method 1

To manually create a restore point, you can use the same System Properties window to activate the System Restore feature. Here’s how.

Step 1: Open the Start menu, type restore and click on ‘Create a restore point’.

2nd step: In the System Protection tab, click the Create button under Protection Settings.

Step 3: Give the restore point a name to easily identify it later.

Step 4: Wait a few seconds for Windows to create the restore point and click Close.

You now have a restore point to fall back to whenever something goes wrong while making a system change or changing settings.

Method 2

Alternatively, you can also use the command prompt to manually create a system restore point on Windows 10. Here’s how.

Step 1: Open the start menu, type cmd to open the command prompt. Select “Run as administrator” to open it with administrator rights.

2nd step: Type the command mentioned below and press Enter.

wmic.exe /Namespace:rootdefault Path SystemRestore Call CreateRestorePoint "RestorePointOne", 100, 7

Replace the RestorePointName text between the quotation marks with the name that you want to assign to the restore point.

You will see a message stating that the method execution was successful and ReturnValue = 0, stating that the restore point was created.

How to use system restore point in Windows 10

Now that the day has arrived, one of the updates or changes has gone wrong and you want to undo your action by reverting to a specific system restore point. Here’s how to use restore points.

Step 1: Open the Start menu, type system Restauration and click on “Create a restore point”.

2nd step: On the System Protection tab, click the System Restore button.

Step 3: You will receive the latest restore point in the recommended restore option. Alternatively, you can also choose another restore point by selecting the “Choose another point” option.

Here, you can click “Search for affected programs” to see the list of programs that will be removed or restored during the restore process.

Step 4: Finally, you will be asked to confirm the system restore point. It will show you the date and time of the restore point. Click Finish to start the restore process.

Your PC will now restart and the restore process will begin. Wait for it to finish and you will return to a previous state. Remember, System Restore also creates a restore point right before reverting to an old one. So you can always come back to where you were.

Backup plan

Creating a system restore point at regular intervals can be useful in an emergency. This way you will not lose all your data and you will avoid resetting your PC. Therefore, creating restore points at regular intervals can help you when troubleshooting your Windows PC.