Tuesday, March 10, 2009

How to edit the registry to modify System Restore?

There are three registry keys that can be used to make changes to XP's System Restore feature. To make these changes, be sure to first back up the registry, then open your registry editor and navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ WindowsNT \ CurrentVersion \ SystemRestore

Perhaps the most useful modification you can make is to set the maximum time that a restore point exists before it is deleted. The setting is specified in seconds, and the default is 7776000, which translates to 90 days. If you want your restore points to hang around longer or you'd like to see them disappear sooner, do this
1. Navigate to the key shown above and in the right details pane, double click or create the DWORD value RPLifeInterval.
2. In the value data field, enter a number in seconds equal to the time that you want restore points to remain on the system before being deleted (for example, to specify a time to live of 30 days, enter the value 2592000).
3. Close the registry editor. There are other values in this key that can be modified, and some that should never be changed.

To find out more...

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