Big error in CCleaner ->System Restore -> Remove (Restore Points)

[Sprint900]

CCleaner user for 15+ years, Had paid license for a while, but am now back on free version. Today, 1st problem & 1st post here.

 

CCleaner v 5.82.8950. Win 10 Home v 21H1 19043.1081. Avast & MalWareBytes. Dell Dimension from 2015.

 

I've long managed my Restore Points in CCleaner. Today I had ~7 of them, and as they were all relatively recent, I chose to delete just the two oldest ones. So I selected them and clicked on Remove. Two seconds later, instead of having 5 listed, I had ZERO. Closed CCleaner, restarted it and went back to the screen. Zero RPs. WTF!?!?!?

(Sorry, no screenshots for the above, but I didn't know I'd need them until it was too late).

So I created a RP manually, via Control Panel, and went back to CCleaner, and I could see it. I created another RP =10 minutes later, and I could also see this one. OK, but I'm no longer inclined to trust CCleaner to manage RPs

Anyone had a similar experience? Anyone got an explanation?

 

Thx, MV

 

 

[nukecad]

No concrete explanation, but Win 10 is known to sometimes behave oddly with RPs.

Maybe your removing 2 with CC prompted Windows to take a look at what had changed and remove the others?

The other thought is did you check in Windows if they were still there? It may have been that CC just couldn't see them?

[Sprint900]

2 hours ago, nukecad said:

Win 10 is known to sometimes behave oddly with RPs

Really? This is the first time I've heard this from any other source, and I've never encountered it myself. in hundreds of hours tinkering with PCs.

2 hours ago, nukecad said:

did you check in Windows if they were still there?

Yes I did, via elevated cmd: vssadmin list shadows

and this showed what I saw in CCleaner, i.e only the two RPs that I created after the error. So it's not a question of CCleaner not being able to see them. It's that CCleaner deleted all RPs, well beyond what I selected for removal, and including the most recent (greyed out) RP.

 

... sanity check ...

Previously, when I went into Tools > System Restore, there was an info message along the lines of "the most recent Restore Point will be retained for security reasons".

Now, I don't get that message. I just see the two recently created RPs, the older of the two greyed out, and nothing more.

Conclusions:

1. There is a change in what is displayed
2. More importantly, there is a big problem with RP management in CCleaner

[Sprint900]

So does this stop here? I was expecting someone else to chime in with their experience of this problem. Or am I the only person to have encountered this?

In any case, what I have described is a serious bug in a very widely used program.

Do some PiriForm folks hang out on this forum? I'd be interested to hear their feedback...

[nukecad]

I can't recreate that here. If I remove restore points with CCleaner only the ones I tell it to remove are gone, the rest are still there.

I'm a bit surprised that you have never heard of RPs going missing, google 'Restore points disappeared Windows 10'.

TBH if it was happening regularly that CCleaner was removing more RPs than told then more people would be seeing it and shouting about it.

The fact that nobody else has chimed in here would tend to indicate that nobody else is seeing it with CCleaner, and so it looks like something else removed them from your machine, probably Windows itself.
The fact that they greyed out one went missing too also points to something other than CCleaner removing them.

PS. The Piriform staff do come here to answer and help, they all have 'CCleaner' following their username and use the CCleaner logo as their avatar.

[Augeas]

Win 10 has sys restore off by default, so that may be a factor. I don't know if a win update would set the sys restore option back to the default off, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[Sprint900]

@nukecad & @Augeas

Thanks very much for your answers. Much appreciated.

21 hours ago, nukecad said:

I'm a bit surprised that you have never heard of RPs going missing, google 'Restore points disappeared Windows 10'.

I've just done this search, and the main reasons put forward for this (insufficient disk space, System Restore Off) don't apply in my case. My Max Usage in System Protection is set to 35 GB, and as of today, with six RPs, Current Usage is 9 GB.

13 hours ago, Augeas said:

Win 10 has sys restore off by default, so that may be a factor. I don't know if a win update would set the sys restore option back to the default off, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm aware of this, and sometimes have to reset it to On after a Win Update. But it was set to On on the day I had my problem (and has been since), as witnessed by the fact that I was able to manually create two RPs immediately after my problem.

I agree that, if this were a widespread problem, other would probably have chipped in by now.

Following another lead from the above search, I ran a sfc /scannow, and this found and corrected some minor FS errors. Maybe this was behind my problem?

I think I'll have to leave it there. Thanks again to those who helped me.

MV

[nukecad]

Yes, I think about all you can do in such circumstances is put it down to 'something' odd happening without knowing exactly what it was.

 

[Andavari]

I think part of the problem with Win10 is:
1. Bugs.
2. Bugs that won't get fixed even if reported.
3. It doesn't always honor a users preferred settings, or quickly forgets them entirely and goes back to defaults. Which I'm currently very familiar with because it won't honor my preferred folder settings even when configured globally for all folders/disks.

[Sprint900]

@ Andavari

Thanks for chipping in on this. After my problem 10 days ago, I was extremely reluctant to use CCleaner to do the housekeeping in my RPs.

Today, I thought I'd try CCleaner again, so I deleted my RPs one by one, 6 - 5 - 4, and it worked fine. Prior to that, I ran another elevated sfc/scannow, and this time there were no errors.

There may possibly be bugs elsewhere in the program, but on the basis of my incident and the conclusions drawn from it, I think the small FS errors I had at the time are likely to be the root cause.

 

Thx

MV

[Andavari]

Helps to actually run a more detailed "corruption fix" to look for Win10 errors since SFC alone isn't enough.

This is what I use, you're already familiar with SFC:

Windows 10 Corruption Fix:

Use each of these one at a time in a Command Prompt (Administrator) or Power Shell (Administrator):

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
SFC /scannow

 

[Sprint900]

On 11/07/2021 at 21:24, Andavari said:

Helps to actually run a more detailed "corruption fix" to look for Win10 errors since SFC alone isn't enough.

This is what I use, you're already familiar with SFC:

Windows 10 Corruption Fix:

Use each of these one at a time in a Command Prompt (Administrator) or Power Shell (Administrator):

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
SFC /scannow

 

@ Andavari

I'm always ready to learn new tricks and try new techniques, but was a bit discombobulated to see that the parameters Cleanup-image and Restorehealth that you gave for dism.exe aren't shown in the /help for dism.exe.

So I hesitantly tried the command:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

as suggested, confident that I'd shortly be writing in to say that your syntax was invalid. But it ran successfully, with a return message of:

C:\>DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.19041.844

Image Version: 10.0.19043.1083

[==========================100.0%==========================] The restore operation completed successfully.
The operation completed successfully.

(../..)

Later, I see that these options are in fact described in M$ documentation. So ...

a) the dism.exe help is incomplete, because it's incomplete

b) it's incomplete because your parameters Cleanup-image and Restorehealth are not for newbies

c) or ... ?

 

Thx

MV

[nukecad]

They are pretty standard paramaters that anyone 'techie' knows, and are usually given in 'follow this exactly' advice to 'non-techies' who are having problems.

sfc on it's own will often do the job - but it uses the 'image' already held on the computer so to be sure using dism first with those parameters makes sure that image is up to date and "good".

So of your options it would be b+) Not known about by newbies and that patticular M$ documentation is at a non-techie level.

But then once you know that the commands/options are there, and know that you should look them up again if you're having problems, you are on your way to becoming a techie and amazing your non-techie friends with your knowkedge.

[Sprint900]

16 hours ago, nukecad said:

you are on your way to becoming a techie and amazing your non-techie friends with your knowledge.

I resemble that statement