Forum Discussion
Point-in-Time restore saved my sanity
Was messing with Windhawk and broke my taskbar icons. Figured System Restore would fix it—except it didn't. Ended up in a GSOD loop that kept dumping me into WinRE. Tried everything, nothing worked.
Had Point-in-Time restore enabled but never used it. Gave it a shot anyway. Took forever and got stuck at 21% for a while—thought I was done for. But it eventually finished and booted Windows back up perfectly, exactly as it was two days ago.
System Restore failed. Point-in-Time saved it.
2 Replies
If you ever get dumped into WinRE again and need to restore from backup, most image-based backup tools (including Windows' own backup) have a "restore from network" option in WinRE. It's a bit hidden, but it's there.
Point-in-Time recovery (often using Volume Shadow Copy or a third-party imaging tool like Veeam, Macrium, or Windows Server's native PiT) works at the block level. It doesn't care about files, registry hives, or application states—it takes a complete snapshot of your entire system volume at a specific moment.
