Page 844 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

When you click Finish and then Yes in the confirmation box, the long, slow

restoration process begins. And the rest, as they say, is history recreated.

Just remember that this process reformats your hard drive, and in the
process wipes out all your data and files. They’ll be replaced with the most
recent snapshot (system image) you’ve made. Of course, you may well have

a regular backup that’s more recent; you can restore that as the final step.

Note
If you were thinking of using a system image to turn a new PC into a replica of your old, crashed
one, be warned: You can’t restore a system image to a new PC’s hard drive if it’s smaller than the
old one. (Yes, even if the data on the backup drive would easily fit on the target drive.)

System Restore

As you get more proficient on a PC, pressing Ctrl+Z—the keyboard

shortcut for Undo—eventually becomes an unconscious reflex. In fact, you
can sometimes spot Windows veterans twitching their Ctrl+Z fingers even
when they’re not near the computer—after knocking over a cup of coffee,

locking the keys inside the car, or blurting out something inappropriate in a
meeting.

Windows offers the mother of all Undo commands: System Restore. This

feature alone can be worth hours of your time and hundreds of dollars in
consultant fees.

The pattern of things going wrong in Windows usually works like this: The

PC works fine for a while, and then suddenly—maybe for no apparent
reason, but most often following an installation or configuration change—it
goes on the fritz. At that point, wouldn’t it be pleasant to be able to tell the

computer, “Go back to the way you were yesterday, please”?

System Restore does exactly that. It “rewinds” your copy of Windows back
to the condition it was in before you, or something you tried to install,