Windows 11 is probably already taking full snapshots of your PC

Microsoft switched on a recovery feature this summer that most people never noticed. Point-in-Time Restore quietly snapshots your entire PC in the background - the operating system, your apps, your settings and your files - so you can roll the whole thing back when something breaks. We covered it when it became generally available in June. What surfaced this week is the part that actually matters to you: on most home PCs, it's already running.

Microsoft's documentation now spells out the defaults. The feature is On on Windows Home machines and on Pro machines that aren't domain-joined or managed by an employer, with one condition - the system drive has to be 200 GB or larger. Below that you can still turn it on yourself. Work-managed PCs stay off until Windows 11 26H2, expected around late September or early October. To see where yours stands, open Settings > System > Recovery, find Point-in-time restore and choose View or edit.

The numbers are worth knowing. A snapshot is taken roughly every 24 hours, each one is kept for a maximum of 72 hours, and the whole set is capped at 2% of your disk - at least 2 GB, never more than 50 GB. Only Enterprise editions can change that timing. Restoring happens from the recovery screen at boot rather than from inside Windows, and on an encrypted drive it asks for your BitLocker recovery key first.

So: useful, free, and not a backup. Three days of history does nothing for a photo you deleted last month, and a restore hands back everything from that moment, including files you'd changed since. Two things worth checking today - that your BitLocker recovery key is somewhere you can actually reach it, which Tendvane's security-posture check reports on, and that Documents, Pictures and Desktop are copied to a drive of your own, which its one-click Backup handles.