Windows 10 Recovery Succumbs to the Tyranny of Choice (Premium)

It should have been straightforward: I was updating The Windows 10 Field Guide last weekend and wanted to choose a chapter that would be easy to update. The Backup and Recovery chapter seemed like an obvious choice: Surely these age-old tools haven't changed in any meaningful way between the last two Windows versions. Right?

Wrong. Microsoft, in fact, made a subtle but dramatic change to the Windows 10 recovery tools between versions 1703 and 1709.

But it's worse than that. Microsoft has also expanded the ways in which we can recover Windows 10 to the point where it illustrates, nicely, one of my key complaints about this operating system. There are just too many damned ways to do the same basic tasks in Windows 10.

Likewise, this confusing array of options, which are accessed via different parts of the OS, each offer their own subtly different features.

What makes this even more unbearable is that Microsoft has changed, over the course of Windows 8.x and several Windows 10 versions, what various recovery features are named, and what they do. If you get used to a certain way of doing things, you may find, over time, that a process you relied on no longer works the way you expect.

Put simply, the whole thing is a mess.

Documenting how these options changed over time will be difficult and perhaps pointless. But I'll offer a high-level overview here just to make the point. Then, I'll describe which recovery options are available to Windows 10 users today. You may be surprised to discover how many ways you can perform the same task. I was.

In Windows 8, Microsoft debuted two related tools, PC Reset and PC Refresh, which used an on-disk system image to blow away your current Windows install and return the PC to its day-one condition. PC Refresh let you do so while retaining your accounts and related personal files and (some) settings, plus your installed Store apps. PC Reset was basically a "nuke it from orbit" option.

Little known at the time, these tools could be modified by the PC maker. So if HP, or whatever, wanted certain utilities, drivers, and even crapware installed every time that a user blew away their PC, they could modify the on-disk recovery image to make that happen. PC Reset was literally about bringing back to its day one condition. Whatever that condition might have been.

By the time Windows 10 shipped, these tools merged into a single tool, called Reset this PC, which provided both reset (nuke) and refresh options via a simple wizard. Fine.

But in Windows 10 version 1607, Microsoft added another tool, called Refresh Windows, which provided another wrinkle to the recovery story: This tool downloaded the latest version of Windows 10 from the web and when you reset your PC using Refresh Windows, you got a clean version of the OS. That is, it did not include any PC maker utilities, drivers, or crapware. This was such a revelation---such a great, user-friendly idea---that I wrote it up as a tip.

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