Micro$oft tech support
informed me that the System Restore feature "will not work" unless the Shadow Volume Copy (SVC) service is running. At the least, it must be running while each Restore Point is created, and at the time that any Restore Point is accessed or restored. They advise that a Restore Point that is created while SVC is disabled, for example, prior to updating a driver, may not be valid with regard to restoring the previous system state perchance the system doesn't work with the driver.
Since Windows does not have a feature which enables the SVC service only while a Restore Point is being created or is being restored, only the user can effect that. Accordingly, Restore Points which are made automagically by Windows may not be valid unless the SVC service is always running by default.
The accumulation of Restore Points that are expanded by SVC copies of files considerably increases the amount of storage space that Restore Points occupy on the drive, to say the least. You might not think that this is a concern, but you would probably be better off with a RAID 1 setup with two drives, in which one drive is a mirror of the other.
What I do not understand is why the SVC service makes a copy of each and every DELETED file before it is deleted!! When I delete a file, I want the file to be deleted, and that is why I confirm the deletion! (Then I must eventually delete it from the Recycle Bin, of course.) If I wanted to make a copy of the file, then I would have instructed Windows to do that.
Of course, copies of a deleted file as its content existed at the time of any other type of "backup" in which it was included still exist. Sometimes they are also restored to the drive from a backup copy regardless of whether that was intended. Any good backup and restore utility program has a feature(s) that allows that to be controlled by the user, however.
