With a heavy heart I have come to the conclusion that I’m going to discontinue this program. System Restore is just not reliable to use in case something does go wrong with your system. To keep supporting this program despite all of the issues that people have with System Restore I feel is a disservice to my users; they certainly deserve better.
I have fought with Microsoft System Restore for long enough and I’m just sick and tired of it. People have been reporting issues with System Restore not working for them and worst of all, System Restore not being able to restore a system back to a working state which makes System Restore completely unreliable for the purpose that it was made for.
At this point I recommend using Macrium Reflect, it’s a free solution for most people and will be guaranteed to be able to restore your system to a known working state. Yes, it takes a lot more effort than using System Restore since it requires you, the user, to create the disk images but it is far more reliable than System Restore and is 100% guaranteed to work every single time you need it to work.
For those users who have stuck by me for all these years, it’s been a fun ride. I thank each and every one of you. Unfortunately it’s time to get off of this bronco and let this program go.
For those of you who want an additional rant about all of this… open the spoiler and read below.
Click for more ranting!
Honestly I’ve had enough fighting Microsoft and System Restore. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten angry emails back regarding people losing System Restore Points for no damn good reason. I’ve looked at the application log file to find that my program wasn’t the cause but I still get a sense that people are still pissed about these restore points just getting deleted for no reason. Hence the reason why I’ve said in my EOL letter to my users that System Restore just isn’t reliable enough for what many people are asking for.
Then I have people telling me that something went wrong with the program; it crashed, it gave an error but when I ask what happened people act like I’m some kind of idiot and that I should know what happened. I had one person tell me in a rather rude message after he uninstalled my software that it would have been better if I had not even been born.
And if that’s not bad enough I’ve got antivirus and system utility vendors to contend with. Some overzealous system utilities like to clean the system and you guessed it, they delete system restore points too. And then you have the antivirus products that often interfere with the system restore process in which even if the system restore point was made successfully the antivirus will step in and prevent the restore from occurring because oh crap… that may be a virus trying to do that. I tried to make it so that the recoveries happen in Safe Mode but even there you can’t run away from your antivirus product and it’ll try and stop the restore.
And then there’s the “Why are you trying to infect my system!?” comments that people have sent me. No, I’m not trying to infect your system; trust me, it’s a false positive but try telling users that. You see, I’m a small time software developer and I can’t afford a digital signature to authenticate my stuff and thus I’m treated badly by the antivirus vendors.
I know that this may seem like a rant and yes, it is a rant. That all above is the reason why I’m EOLing System Restore Point Creator. I’m done with it.