And you can't disable the automatic setting of points daily?
No. You can't have it enabled but only making manual points - or not by
easily-accessible settings.
You could use one of those progs that don't allow enough idle time. I'd
never thought of that as something desirable
but it certainly is
possible. Mike Maltby has an increasingly comprehensive list of what stops
SR making automatic points - various builds of ZoneAlarm, for eg - but I
suppose one could write a little app to do it without using more resources
than necessary to achieve just that end.
You can alter the frequency of automatic restore point creation - via a
registry setting. I've never altered mine as it never interested me:
http://tinyurl.com/a5kv4
Of course, the idea of SR is mostly that it's making restore points for the
unexpected, for when you wouldn't normally bother to do it manually.
You see,
I picture millions of typical users with malware/spyware on their PCs
they aren't aware of, continually backing it up. That make me shudder.
They'll be cleaning up malware and then restoring it
Any sane
scheme of backup/restore would be entirely in the hands of the user.
It's generally recognised that SR is no use for going back more than a
week - two at the most - because it doesn't archive everything, so the more
changes meantime, the more out-of-sync the system'll get and the more likely
it'll be in a worse state than before.
You can pretty-much guarantee that it won't keep restore points older than a
week or two - because it FIFO's - by limiting the amount of space allocated.
Unfortunately by default a massive amount of space is allocated. So in
effect it doesn't work out of the box, for those who need it most, as
someone more knowledgable needs to intervene. By default SR on modern drives
will keep restore points going back for months, probably years! Set sensibly
SR won't restore malware beyond about a week of cleaning.
SR never restores automatically, not like the registry is sometimes restored
whether you like it or not. But logically it's more likely to be used by the
naive and/or careless, and in that respect, in the context of security, it
clearly fails.
MS have been slowly correcting stuff - the Windows Firewall being on as
opposed to off in XP SP2 as an example. Yet SR's inadequacies have been
known of and complained about for a long time and not really addressed. The
SP2 Security Center interacts with one's AV to a degree - maybe it's time it
did so to the extent of having the archive operation scanned for nasties.
There's no getting around the personal responsibility of users. So, as
always, user education (or least some instruction) is paramount.
Yes. Can't argue with that!
Cheers yourself!
Shane
