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Yesterday I thought that something had gone wrong with my system, so I restored my system from a restore point that was automatically created a week ago. The system restoration went well. Everything seems to work fine, except that I once got an error message when opening Notepad, saying that the application could not be started, but it was a one-off incident, and I haven't experienced this problem again.

I've now realized that nothing was actually wrong with my system to begin with, so restoring the system was not needed.

A friend of mine is now telling me that System Restore has side effects. He says that if I examined logs, I would almost certainly see that my system now experiences various errors or conflicts, even though I don't see them as the user. He compares System Restore with performing a surgery as every surgery creates a tissue damage and leaves a scar. He says that even though I don't see any problems with my system, it is kind of damaged anyway, and this damage may make my system somewhat slower and cause issues in the future.

Is what he is saying true? Should I be concerned?

(My system is Windows 11 Home.)

Mitsuko
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2 Answers2

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A System Restore to a prior point does not intrinsically have any side effects.

If your system is working fine, then very most likely the prior point is fine.

So there is nothing to be concerned about.

You may wish to run updates again to make sure later updates are complete.

Your friend's statements fall into the area of misinformation.

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Any time that you create a System Restore point, the restore process starts with creating a new Restore point. This means that you can restore back to this point, so undo your last restore and go back to the situation as it was before.

Regarding side-effects : A Restore point does not contain the entire system. This is not a backup. It concentrates on some folders and some types of files (such as .exe).

This means that you not only lose any applications that you installed or modified, you might also lose parts of some installation that were not totally restored. You might find yourself with a mixture of old and new files or settings, with unknown side-effects.

I recommend restoring back to the latest Restore point, which hopefully was created just a short while ago.

harrymc
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