50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this.<p>My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.
It's not related to the actual article but the footnote about advertisment is what strike me the most :<p>> Advertising revenue is falling fast across the Internet, and independently-run sites like Ghacks are hit hardest by it. The advertising model in its current form is coming to an end, and we have to find other ways to continue operating this site.<p>It's no wonder Google is pushing to remove (partially) the ability to block ads in Chrome. If the business model based on ads is seriously at stake, a big chunk of the revenues of Alphabet is compromised.
I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months.<p>It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent.<p>It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp.<p>So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into windows 10 all I can think of is that it's for the good of Microsoft. But they had to add a little window dressing to make the users happy.
Can someone explain why a monolithic Registry is a good idea, compared to something like macOS's .plists?<p>I can usually intuitively infer where the plist for a particular app or subsystem may be stored, or just search for it using regular file system tools, and I can use many tools to read, edit and <i>selectively</i> backup/restore plists as well as compress them (something I make use of often, to restore settings only for specific apps on a fresh machine/installation, something that was very cumbersome to do with the Registry.)<p>I also have yet to experience plist corruptions even once for even one file on macOS, but several times with the Registry during my time on Windows, with multiple unrelated parts of the monolith crumbling at the same time.
Meanwhile, after the latest 1809, there were over 2GiB of update clutter not cleaned up automatically. It took two rounds of Disk Cleanup run manually to get rid of which took over an hour with laptop fans running on high the whole time. This was on a non-OEM, directly from microsoft.com, clean installation of Windows 10 Pro 1709. Windows updates are an abomination.
> The scheduled task to create the backups was still running and the run result indicated that the operation completed successfully, but Registry backups were not created anymore.<p>> 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.<p>I suppose I can see removing the automatic backup feature to save disk space, but what is the argument for silently <i>pretending</i> that you're backing up?
I'm still on Windows 7 on a 2012 desktop. There's no reason for me to change. I've yet to run into any situation that has required me to upgrade. Since the world is generally web-first, the only thing that matters is Chrome and Firefox. Even running 4K video just required a codec upgrade as opposed to CPU upgrade.<p>Yes there are security concerns but I'm pretty vigilant. I haven't run a virus scanner in 15 years, I'm just extremely paranoid over what I click on and which sites I visit. I run an ad-blocker and pi-hole to decrease any attack vectors. If attacks like spear-phishing become a lot more prevalent and much harder to detect then maybe I'll have to upgrade to keep up with security patches but until then I'm keeping status quo with a lot of backups.
This sort of thinking might have been understandable back during the '90's. However, today, people have plenty of free space on their hard disk. The track record of Windows 10 has been so poor lately that it's surprising that MS got so overconfident that they decided that they didn't need safeguards like this any longer.
>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: [...Steps 1-6...]<p>Step 0: Back up your registry!
How the heck are you supposed to use the backup without the registry? You might as well just handpick which document folders you want to back up. Without the registry you can’t even load a DLL; interfaces are loaded via UUID which seeks to the registry to find the dll and its threading model.
> The system registry is no longer backed up to the RegBack folder starting in Windows 10 version 1803<p>> 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.<p>> If you have to use the legacy backup behavior, you can re-enable it by configuring the following registry entry, and then restarting the computer: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Configuration Manager\EnablePeriodicBackup
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1<p>The issue being not that they stopped doing it but that they failed to properly communicate it to the users.
Coincidentally, I got bit by this on a family computer over this weekend (had to reinstall). I went around enabling the backup via the registry on all of them.
Yeah considering May 2019 iso takes 26.6 gigabytes post install and updates I'm having a hard time believing this excuse. This is a system with no additional tools by the way, no python, no office, no nothing. Just straight up windows install -> check updates & wait.
This is good, right?<p>We constantly moan on HN about those diabolical Electron apps which waste 50 MB of disk.<p>Microsoft saved 50 MB of disk here, they are true heros. We applaud.<p>After all, why did I pay for all that sweet SSD disk space if not to keep it free.
Omitting automatic registry backups is a defensible policy. Telling the user that a backup was completed while a 0 byte file was saved is lying. Seems like a criminal act under the circumstances.
I suspect the simplest explanation is "Microsoft is tired of people being able to use really old versions so they are breaking that ability any way they can."<p>See the current situation of Windows 10. There are specific "checkpoint" versions and they force you really aggressively to come up to them when they get released.