Microsoft Issues Warning For 800M Windows 10 Users

Consumer tech reporter Gordon Kelly describes “an important new Windows 10 warning (and the failure behind it)” for all 800 million of Microsoft’s Windows 10 users:

What Microsoft confirms it did was quietly switch off Registry backups in Windows 10 eight months ago, despite giving users the impression this crucial safeguarding system was still working. As Ghacks spotted at the time, Registry backups would show “The operation completed successfully”, despite no backup file being created…

Microsoft has now spelt out what was actually happening: “Starting in Windows 10, version 1803, Windows no longer automatically backs up the system registry to the RegBack folder. If you browse to the WindowsSystem32configRegBack folder in Windows Explorer, you will still see each registry hive, but each file is 0kb in size….”

So why has Microsoft done this? In the company’s own words: “to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windowsâ. And how big is a registry backup? Typically 50-100MB.
The article notes that this issue was flagged in Microsoft’s Feedback Hub — last October — but “only now is the company coming clean about what happened.”

The Ghacks blog points out that the Registry backup option “has been disabled but not removed according to Microsoft. Administrators who would like to restore the functionality may do so by changing the value of a Registry key.”