Windows 11 just got a major upgrade to PC recovery, and it finally protects your personal files

Microsoft's new recovery feature brings seamless full-system restoration to general users, fixing a broken PC in minutes.

Recovering your Windows 11 PC just got easier. This week, Microsoft rolled out point-in-time restore for Windows 11 to general users. The feature creates restore points automatically that you can revert to if there's an issue with your computer.

Point-in-time restore is available to Enterprise, Pro, and Home users of Windows 11. According to Microsoft, the feature can recover a PC in minutes rather than hours.

When you have Point-in-time restore enabled, the feature automatically captures the system state of your PC, including Windows, installed apps, system and app configurations, settings, and your local files.

By default, restore points are captured every 24 hours, but you can configure that to a different cadence if you're an Enterprise user.

The feature is on by default on Windows Home and Windows Pro devices as long as they are not under enterprise management. Point-in-time restore is off by default for some enterprise-managed systems until Windows 11 version 26H2 is installed.

If a PC has an OS volume size under 200GB, point-in-time restore will be disabled by default.

Microsoft already had other features that are somewhat similar, such as System Restore and point-in-time restore for Windows 365 Enterprise. But both of those have key differences when compared to point-in-time restore for Windows 11.

System Restore requires manual capture of an image and does not include user files as part of the restore point. It's also accessible through the Control Panel rather than system settings and takes up more space on your PC.

Point-in-time restore for Windows 11 also provides benefits to IT admins, since the feature can be remotely managed with a wide set of controls.

Point-in-time for Windows 365 Enterprise is for Cloud PCs. It's also limited to Enterprise users.

Over two million devices had point-in-time restore enabled while the feature was in public preview. Microsoft said it used the time in preview to improve the feature based on feedback.

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Posted Thursday 25 June 2026 at 10:49 am AEST (my time).

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