Restore Point creation disabled by Group Policy

When you start the System Restore utility (rstrui.exe), the message System Restore has been turned off by your system administrator. To turn on System Restore, contact your system administrator.” appears.

Also when you open System Properties and select the System Protection tab, the Create button may be grayed out, and the following message is displayed.

Restore point creation disabled by Group Policy

System Restore has been turned off by your system administrator

This happens if the Turn off Configuration and Turn off System Restore Policies are enabled in your system, either using Group Policy or through registry edit. For standalone Windows client systems, use these steps to remove the System Restore Policies.

Using the Group Policy Editor (for Pro Editions of Windows)

If your edition of Windows includes the Group Policy Editor snap-in (gpedit.msc), follow these steps:

1. Click Start, type gpedit.msc and press ENTER

2. Go to the following branch:

Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System | System Restore

3. Double-click Turn off Configuration and set it to Not configured.

4. Double-click Turn off System Restore and set it to Not configured.



Important: If the above settings are already set to Not configured, set them to Enabled and click Apply. Then revert back the setting to Not configured, and click Apply, OK. This clears the equivalent registry-based Policies if applied earlier.

4. Exit the Group Policy Editor.

Using the Registry Editor

1. Start the Registry Editor (regedit.exe)

2. Navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\SystemRestore

3. In the right-pane, delete the values named DisableSR and DisableConfig

4. Exit the Registry Editor.


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Ramesh Srinivasan is passionate about Microsoft technologies and he has been a consecutive ten-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in the Windows Shell/Desktop Experience category, from 2003 to 2012. He loves to troubleshoot and write about Windows. Ramesh founded Winhelponline.com in 2005.

14 thoughts on “Restore Point creation disabled by Group Policy”

  1. Keep up the good work:

    3:00 am – Last known issue from “Protect Yourself” virus.

    Also disabled regedit (Arghhhh!) and taskmgr. Those virus coders are pieces of S**t

    You my good sir are a true White Hat.

    TJ

    Reply
  2. I use a vista home premium and it does not say DisableConfig but instead it says DisableSR Type: REG_DWORD should I go ahead and delete it anyway?

    Reply
    • @Michael: Yes. Try clearing the DisableSR value as well. My REG file linked in the article clears those two values automatically.

  3. THANK YOU SO MUCH!! This post helps a lot of people with this kind of problem! Now I can finally use System Restore! Again, Thank you so much!

    Reply
  4. The srpol-clear.reg did the trick for me. Although my Vista registry does not show any changes it now works. Bizarre…
    Could not find any restrictive entry in the registry and gpedit.scm did not do it for me. Only running srpol-clear.reg did it.!
    Anyway a big word of thanks

    Reply
  5. “3. In the right-pane, delete the value named DisableConfig ”

    I found that phrasing confusing. It turns out that the whole line is deleted. I took the value of ” 1 ” that showed up and deleted it. That defaulted to ” o “, but did not solve the problem.

    However, I got more than enough advice to get the REG file to run and allow me to create my own restore points again.

    Thank you!

    Reply

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