14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has recently published a tech document to explain that the lack of registry backups in Windows 10 isn’t a bug, but an actual feature of the operating system.
The first time we reported about Windows 10 no longer creating backups of the registry was in November 2018 when everybody seemed to think that it was all because of a bug in the October 2018 Update.
But according to Microsoft, this is a change that was originally implemented in Windows 10 version 1803, or April 2018 Update, and is part of every feature update released since then.
Use system restore
In other words, Windows 10 version 1803 (April 2018 Update), Windows 10 version 1809 (October 2018 Update), and Windows 10 version 1903 (May 2019 Update) do not back up the registry automatically as per the scheduled task.
“Starting in Windows 10, version 1803, Windows no longer automatically backs up the system registry to the RegBack folder. If you browse to the \Windows\System32\config\RegBack folder in Windows Explorer, you will still see each registry hive, but each file is 0kb in size,” Microsoft explains.
“This change is by design, and is intended to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows. To recover a system with a corrupt registry hive, Microsoft recommends that you use a system restore point,” the company continues.
The workaround, for those who really want to create an automatic backup of the registry, is to restore the legacy backup behavior, which you can do by setting up a registry entry and then rebooting the system. Full instructions are available in the document linked in this article.
So there you go, the lack of registry backups is a feature, not a bug, and it is implemented in the latest Windows 10 versions, with the next releases to boast it as well.