System Protection - Turn On or Off in Windows 8

Brink · Mar 9, 2012

How to Turn System Protection On or Off in Windows 8 and 8.1

Information

System protection is a feature that regularly creates and saves information about your computer's system files, programs, drivers, and registry settings as restore points for all drives that have system protection turned on. You can use these restore points to do a system restore to return these items to an earlier point in time without affecting personal files (ex: anything in C:\Users\(user-name) folder). Restore points are created just before significant system events, such as the installation of a program or device driver. They're also created automatically by Windows using a scheduled task once every seven days if no other restore points were created in the previous seven days, but you can create restore points manually at any time.

System protection is turned on by default for the drive that Windows 8 is installed on. System protection can only be turned on for drives that are formatted using the NTFS file system, and not with FAT or FAT32.

This tutorial will show you how to turn system protection on or off for drives of your choice in Windows 8 and 8.1.

System Restore isn't available for Windows RT.

You must be logged in as an administrator to be able to turn system restore protection on or off.

Here's How:

1. Do step 2, 3, or 4 below for how you would like to open System.

2. Open the Power User Tasks Menu, click/tap on System, and go to step 5. (see screenshot below)

OR

3. Open the Control Panel (icons view), click/tap on the System icon, and go to step 5.

OR

4. Open the Control Panel (icons view), click/tap on the Recovery icon, click/tap on the Configure System Restore link, and go to step 6. (see screenshot below)

5. Click/tap on the System protection link in the left pane. (see screenshot below)

6. If prompted by UAC, then click/tap on Yes.

7. Select a listed drive that you would like to turn system protection on or off for, click/tap on the Configure button, then do either step 8 or 9 below for what you wanted to do. (see screenshot below)

8. To Turn On System Restore Protection for a Drive

A) Select (dot) Turn on system protection. (see screenshot below)

B) Move the Max Usage slider to set the maximum disk space usage you want to be used by system protection on the selected drive, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshot above)

C) Go to step 10.

9. To Turn Off System Restore Protection for a Drive

A) Select (dot) Disable system protection, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshot below step 8A)

B) Click/tap on Yes, to acknowledge that all restore points on the drive will be deleted. (see screenshot below)

C) Go to step 10.

10. Repeat step 7 if you wanted to turn system protection on or off for another drive.

11. When finished, click on OK. (see screenshot below step 7)

12. If open, you can now close the System or Recovery window if you like. (see screenshot below step 4 or 5)

That's it,
Shawn

System Protection - Turn On or Off in Windows 8

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