You get to the System Restore window by going to Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items -> System, & clicking System Protection on the upper left. To turn System Restore on/off, select the drive partition [letter] you’re concerned with, and click Configure. While I seem to remember 3 choices being available, both Win10 Pro & Home v. 1909 give you two: on & off. There’s a slider where you can adjust the amount of drive space to allow – if you fill that up new restore points will overwrite old ones – but how much to allot is entirely up to you [I've left it at the default 0 and Win10 Will Not increase it]. The window shows you how much drive space is currently being taken up by restore points, and also has a button to clear or delete them all.
Originally the way it worked, starting with Vista, is that System Restore takes a snapshot of every file, but tends to not restore files like documents you created, because you may have done work to them before restoring to fix a Windows problem. After right clicking a file, System Restore would also let you restore individual files that were captured in a restore point, but nowadays that *may* be something only available on the Enterprise version of Win10 – I’ve read that but not confirmed it [yet]. With Vista and Win7 I found that System Restore didn’t always work for me, so I started using VMs, Shadow Defender [for virtualization], and *possibly* the new Win10 Sandbox, along with doing more image backups; I can’t recall ever using System Restore with Win10, so I’ve no idea how well, or often it works. Some quick searches using Google with terms like “Windows 10 System Restore not working” [w/out quotes] got Very high numbers of hits however, suggesting the iffy nature of System Restore persists.
System Restore is supposed to have its own default schedule for creating restore points, plus when certain changes are made, and Windows Update will add one before installing an update, but personally I’ve found Windows Update to be the only reliable cause for a restore point to be created. [I base that on always deleting restore points before a backup.] You can find articles on having System Restore create more frequent restore points by editing the registry, and several articles, like the one below from How-To Geek, talk about using Windows Task Scheduler. *Maybe* more convenient, TheWindowsClub has a couple of free apps: Ultimate Windows Tweaker lets you add System Restore to the desktop right click context menu [the portable app's only used to add it to that menu], while Quick Restore Maker lets you create a restore point with one click, which can also be used with Task Scheduler. [Be careful – I found several misleading ads that looked like the official download links on their web site.]
howtogeek[.]com/278388/how-to-make-windows-automatically-create-a-system-restore-point-at-startup/
neowin[.]net/news/ultimate-windows-tweaker-47
thewindowsclub[.]com/create-a-system-restore-point-in-1-click-with-quick-restore-maker
You can also create a restore point from the Command Prompt -- wmic shadowcopy call create Volume=c:\ -- I’m unsure if there are any differences vs. doing it by clicking the Create button in the System Restore window, or using the Quick Restore Maker app etc. There are several apps that let you access the previous file versions captured by System Restore – NirSoft’s ShadowCopyView seems like maybe it’s the most popular -- nirsoft[.]net/utils/shadow_copy_view.html . [Note that unlike what you see in Windows Explorer, with Documents etc. at the top of the list on the left, you’ll have to navigate into the User file tree to find that stuff.]
It appears that Microsoft would rather you use Win10’s File History. You can find it in both Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items, and in Settings -> Update & Security -> Backup. It requires another drive partition, drive [external or internal], or you can specify a network location [it will default to an external drive if one’s attached]. You set which folders to back up, what to exclude, how often to back up [the default’s every hour], how long to keep backed up files, and what happens when the drive space fills up.
