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Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

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Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#71

Post by anticensor »

barrkel wrote: post #62
Waterluvian wrote: post #37

I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months. It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent. It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp. So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into wind…

The settings screens dating from the iconic control panel era can't easily be dumped because third party drivers add tabs and extend the dialogs. That's a big part of the problem.

They could have made a partial machine translator to convert to the modern control panel and an API wrapper for runtime compatibility in the interim.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#72

Post by nogridbag »

Waterluvian wrote: post #37

I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months. It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent. It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp. So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into wind…

I just booted up my Surface Book for the first time in months. It attempted to download and install Windows 10 update 1903. The update failed with a large dialog telling me my system isn't ready to install update 1903.

I'm going to sound like the naive end user now, but isn't it the job of the update manager to only download and install updates that are ready to be installed?

It did eventually install 1903 after about 2 restarts. But failed updates are always scary to an end user.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#73

Post by Taniwha »

derefr wrote: post #65
Waterluvian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like it was the intent. But I got into old menus simply by trying to change the clock time. Definitely not an IT professionals who don't care kind of action.

Sure it is. What home user even realizes they can change the clock time any more? Consider: can you change the clock time on your phone? I've never even considered doing so, personally. Seems like it'd screw up the GPS, if it was possible. Anyone whose first computer was a smartphone isn't going to think of changing their computer's clock time. To them, the time is a network feature, not a local feature.

GPS satellite signals include their own time

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#74

Post by londons_explore »

antisthenes wrote: post #34
gaze wrote: post #29

Disable backups, fine. Ok. But don't _lie to the user_

Actually no, why is disabling backups in the name of saving 100MB of disk space ever OK? Did we go back to 1995 when disk space was expensive? I'd like to look the manager/developer who approved that change in the eye and ask them what the hell were they thinking. As far lying to the user goes...hasn't that been MS's motto for at least since W10 came out? That's the least surprising part. A poor technical decision is…

The registry is still backed up via system restore points and versioned file history. It is still possible (albeit hard) to restore the registry to any point in time via those.

These backups were really a bad plan - they were making a copy of the registry, and then a system restore point or 3rd party full system backup would backup all the backups.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#76

Post by londons_explore »

JadeNB wrote: post #56

> The scheduled task to create the backups was still running and the run result indicated that the operation completed successfully, but Registry backups were not created anymore. > This change is by design, and is intended to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows. To recover a system with a corrupt registry hive, Microsoft recommends that you use a system restore point. I suppose I can see removing…

Presumably because they needed to maintain compatibility with other tools which require those backups to exist or interact with that scheduled task or the logs it creates.

Windows really is a recursive backwards-compatibility hack...

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#77

Post by anticensor »

JadeNB wrote: post #56

> The scheduled task to create the backups was still running and the run result indicated that the operation completed successfully, but Registry backups were not created anymore. > This change is by design, and is intended to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows. To recover a system with a corrupt registry hive, Microsoft recommends that you use a system restore point. I suppose I can see removing…

Backwards "Compatibility". A program might check for those files and folders exist and warn you to complete your backups.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#78

Post by blablabla123 »

rando444 wrote: post #5

50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this. My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.

Yes but isolated registry backups make as much sense as a full backup of a modern Linux Desktop's /etc folder. Probably not much. The config's content depends a lot on the things installed and vice-versa, even more so on Windows (unless they changed something fundamentally since 7). At least on Linux and in particular Ubuntu (Desktop) installations I aim for as little manual configuration changes as possible anyways, so updates don't break things...

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#79

Post by jjwhitaker »

nogridbag wrote: post #72
Waterluvian wrote: post #37

I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months. It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent. It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp. So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into wind…

I just booted up my Surface Book for the first time in months. It attempted to download and install Windows 10 update 1903. The update failed with a large dialog telling me my system isn't ready to install update 1903. I'm going to sound like the naive end user now, but isn't it the job of the update manager to only download and install updates that are ready to be installed? It did eventually install 1903 after abou…

In my case there is a glitch in the 1903 install where having external drives attached forces a fail as the installer can't determine which is the Windows drive or something (per an error/forum I read at the time). I had coped the ISO from a USB so removing the USB drive resolved the error.

I think it's picky to prevent issues similar to 1809 install. That was a mess and I'm sure MSFT would rather have an error before upgrading than a user missing all their data or something worse.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#80

Post by partiallypro »

Waterluvian wrote: post #37

I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months. It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent. It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp. So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into wind…

OSX does the same thing across apps and tools, with different menu styles that don't match etc.
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