Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7271 in the Dev and Beta channels brings with it a new recovery option that restores your PC to the exact state it was at a previous point in time. Microsoft calls it Point-in-time restore, and it works by creating automatic restore points of your entire system, including apps, settings, and local files.

Point-in-time restore works offline, as the restore points are stored locally on your PC’s SSD. It can restore the full system state within the last 72 hours (3 days). The best part is that fast recovery with restore points is simpler, and is capable of fixing driver issues, bad updates, or misconfiguration issues.

In our testing, Windows Latest found that the Point-in-time restore feature works as expected and recovered our full system settings, apps, and files.

What is Point-in-time restore in Windows?

Point-in-time restore is a new recovery system in Windows 11 and Windows 10 that uses Volume Shadow Copy Service to capture complete system states at fixed intervals.

A restore point is a block-level shadow copy of the entire MainOS volume that contains the operating system files, installed programs, settings, account data, and local user files. Because the restore point includes everything on the OS volume, it can return the PC to the exact state it was in when the copy was taken.

While System Restore focuses only on system files, registry settings, drivers, and certain executables, Point-in-time restore covers everything, including user data. System Restore also intentionally avoids copying documents and personal files.

Microsoft built the Point-in-time restore feature to give users a modern equivalent of a full rollback without any disk images or backup software.

How Point-in-time restore works

Point-in-time Restore is powered by Volume Shadow Copy Service. VSS is a Windows subsystem that creates consistent block-level copies of a volume even while the system is running. It freezes writes long enough to make an accurate copy, then resumes activity in the background.

VSS has existed for years for backup software, but Point-in-time Restore uses it in an automated way. Restore points are created automatically on a schedule, stored in VSS’s diff area, and retained for up to 72 hours.

If a user selects point-in-time restore when Windows boots into the recovery environment, the user will get an option to select the restore point they want. Since these restore points contain the entire system state, the restore process rewrites all blocks that changed since the last copy.

System Restore cannot do this because it only tracks changes to protected system areas. That is the main technical difference. Point-in-time restore performs a miniature full-disk rollback, but System Restore performs a targeted rollback of select system components.

How to enable Point-in-time Restore in Windows 11

As of now, the Point-in-time Restore feature is only available to Dev and Beta Insiders who have installed the KB5070307 update, and this, too, in typical Microsoft fashion, is hidden.

If you want to try it in your test machine, go ahead and register as a Windows Insider for Dev or Beta builds, and install the latest Preview Build 26220.7271.

After the update, go to Settings > System > Recovery

Select the Point-in-time restore option.

Turn on the toggle for Point-in-time restore.

By default, the Restore point frequency is every 24 hours, meaning every 24 hours, your entire system will be stored in your PC.

Since this is your first time turning it on, the process will start immediately. After which, a scheduler will pick the next restore point based on your PC’s boot timing and the time of the last restore point.

You can customize the Restore point frequency to a lower time, starting with 4 hours. 24 hours is the maximum time that can be put between two restore points. You can choose 6, 12, or 16 hours.

Whatever you choose, restore points will be created in the background, without interfering with your work.

The Restore point retention is set at 72 hours by default. It means that the retention point will be stored in your PC for 72 hours. Depending on your storage, the oldest restore point is deleted first.

You can choose a minimum restore point retention of 6 hours, with options from 12, 16, and 24 hours. The maximum retention period is 72 hours. A retention time of 6 hours means that the oldest restore point will be auto-deleted after 6 hours.

There is also a “Maximum usage limit” slider, which you can use to choose the amount of storage on your PC to store restore points.

Note that if you are low on storage, there may be an earlier deletion of restore points. Also, space is not pre-allocated or partitioned for restore points. Any remaining space within the maximum usage limit that is not used by restore points will be available to be used by your PC.

Microsoft also mentions that the Point-in-time restore feature will only be turned on by default if your PC has a total disk size of at least 200GB. Since my virtual machine has only 60GB of storage, the feature was turned off by default.

Test: Restoring a PC using Point-in-time restore

After enabling Point-in-time restore, you need to wait for some time for your system to create a restore point. Microsoft doesn’t give any indication of whether a restore point has been created or not, because it is supposed to happen in the background.

To test Point-in-time restore, you need to enter WinRE. For that, go to Settings > System > Recovery > Advanced startup. Click Restart now.

From WinRE, select Troubleshoot.

From the Troubleshoot options, click Point-in-time restore.

You may be asked to provide your BitLocker Recovery Key if you have encrypted volumes, which you can get from https://account.microsoft.com/devices/recoverykey.

You’ll now be shown the different restore points. Since this is the first time I have enabled it, there is only one restore point. Click on the restore point that closely matches the time you want your system to restore to.

Microsoft will show you a warning that says any data that you created after the time mentioned in the restore point will be lost. Click Continue.

Check the restore point selection and OS version. Microsoft gives a final warning of data loss. Select Restore to start the restore process.

The restoration process will take a fair bit of time, depending on the number of apps and files you have. On my PC, it took around 30 minutes to restore completely, even though it had very few apps.

After the restore is complete, your PC boots back into Windows 11, without losing any apps or files.

Limitations and risks of Point-in-time restore

Point-in-time restore rewrites the entire MainOS volume to an older state. So, every change made after the restore point, including user files, application data, passwords, encryption keys, and certificates, is lost.

If you create or edit a document after the restore point, it will not survive. Since Microsoft doesn’t show when the restore points store data, it will be difficult to know if important data will be part of a restore point.

VSS itself can fail to create restore points if your storage is almost full, when the system is under heavy input and output load, or when the VSS writer becomes unstable. Point-in-time restore can also fail if there is not enough free space to stage the restore or if a corrupted file system prevents VSS from completing the rollback.

Windows cannot guarantee restore points will be created exactly on the chosen schedule because the system might be off or in sleep mode.

Restoring across different Windows editions, for example, moving from Home to Pro and back, can break the installation. VSS also struggles with encrypted EFS files and may fail to restore them reliably. If you have several partitions, only the MainOS volume is rolled back. Restore points cannot be exported, mounted, or browsed like disk images. They are internal VSS objects only.

It’s good to see Microsoft taking efforts to fix issues in Windows, but of course, this wouldn’t be necessary if Windows didn’t crash in the first place. But that is how Microsoft works, and it’s evident even with the File Explorer, where Microsoft decided that preloading File Explorer would make it faster, instead of fixing lags inside it.

The post I tested Windows 11’s Point-in-time Restore and it’s one of the best features without AI appeared first on Windows Latest

After nearly 2 years of work, we are excited to finally announce that we have released Cordova iOS 8.0.0! This is Cordova's platform supporting the development of applications for iOS & iPadOS; now with better support for the latest platform features.

• cordova-ios@8.0.0

To upgrade:

cordova platform remove ios
cordova platform add ios@8.0.0

This is a major version release which includes some breaking changes!
We have tried hard to make the update process as smooth as possible for both application and plugin developers, while improving the experience for developers embedding Cordova iOS as a library.

For plugin authors, we've written a guide about Upgrading Plugins to Cordova iOS 8.x.

Release Highlights

• Supported version minimums
  • The minimum supported iOS version is now 13.
  • The minimum supported Xcode version is now 15.
  • The minimum supported NodeJS version is now 20.17.
• Embracing Swift
  • The platform project now uses Swift classes and a storyboard file.
  • Plugins can now be set up as Swift packages, including other Swift packages as dependencies.
  • CordovaLib is available as a Swift package to be embedded in existing projects.
• Platform project modernizing
  • The Xcode project, and build target are now always named App.
    This resolves numerous issues around CocoaPods, multi-target projects, and Info.plist additions, but potentially breaks some hooks that assume the project name matches what's defined in config.xml.
  • The platform project now supports building for macOS using Catalyst.
  • The platform project has adopted the iOS Scene APIs, which are required for iOS 26 support.
  • CordovaLib (used as a library) supports targeting the visionOS platform.
• Build-in status bar handling
  • Status bar handling is now built-in to Cordova iOS, and the StatusBar plugin is no longer required in most cases.
  • Whether the status bar is shown or not is controlled by the viewport meta tag's viewport-fit directive.
  • The background color of the status bar is controlled by the theme-color meta tag.
• App icon simplification
  • Projects can now provide a single 1024px × 1024px icon in config.xml.
  • Projects building with Xcode 16 or newer can provide monochrome and dark mode icon variants.
  • See GH-1465 for details.
  • NOTE: Cordova iOS 8.0.0 does not include support for the new Xcode 26 Icon Composer file format. We hope to introduce support in the near future.
• Bunches of bugs fixed
  • Range requests are now supported for large media files when using a custom protocol.
  • Opening system alert boxes from JavaScript code should no longer freeze the application.
  • Improved error messaging when no iOS simulators are installed.
  • Configurable behavior for recovering from web view crashes that sometimes left blank screens.
  • Fix for handleOpenURL() not firing reliably when the app is launched.
  • Improve handling for the deployment-target preference with CocoaPods.
• Embedded framework improvements
  • Several memory leaks have been fixed when disposing of a Cordova view controller.
  • Several API improvements for specifying background colours and splash screen behaviour.
  • Introduced CDVSceneDelegate for integrating with the iOS Scene API.
  • Added nullability annotations to several classes and API methods.
  • New API documentation is published for the CordovaLib classes.

The full changelog is available to read here. Please report any issues you find on our Cordova-iOS GitHub issue tracker!

Rachel Lockett is a sought-after executive coach and former HR leader at Stripe and Pinterest who now works with CEOs, founders, and tech leaders on emotional intelligence, resilience, and leadership skills. In this episode, Rachel shares powerful frameworks for coaching reports, having difficult conversations, avoiding burnout, and strengthening co-founder relationships. She also demonstrates these techniques through a live coaching session with me.

We discuss:

* When to coach and when to just tell people what to do [09:00]

* The GROW technique for helping people figure out a solution for themselves [18:37]

* Techniques for making difficult conversations less difficult [01:20:28]

* Avoiding burnout and designing a more energizing career [41:55]

* Building and sustaining a healthy co-founder relationship [01:06:50]

* Creating a one-page plan that aligns your entire company [01:31:47]

* Practical ways AI is transforming executive coaching and leadership development [01:36:50]

* Why you should ask, “Would I enthusiastically rehire this person?” to clarify talent decisions [23:55]

Also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Brought to you by:

Stripe—Helping companies of all sizes grow revenue

Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.

Persona—A global leader in digital identity verification

Where to find Rachel Lockett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhlockett/

• Website: https://www.lockettcoaching.com

Referenced:

• One-page plan template: https://www.lockettcoaching.com/#resources

• Lockett Coaching Leadership Toolkit: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s74a9cn1ka1ebz6pglypf/Leadership-Toolkit_-Coaching-Rachel-Lockett.pdf?rlkey=yg2m9df2ziwy0fa6p0dt4gcfu&st=dgzvnf76&dl=0

• Renew Your Co-Founder Vows—and Other Tactics for Strengthening the Most Important Relationship in Your Startup: https://review.firstround.com/five-practices-to-strengthen-your-co-founder-relationship/

• First Round Guide to Co-Founder Check-Ins: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yUosmfMuE-8-sAwPrEPDcGqkJLVLWg5dC2_8lcXm7U4/edit?tab=t.0

• Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com

• Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?: https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-monkey

• Chuck Palahniuk’s quote from Fight Club: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1338270-people-don-t-listen-they-just-wait-for-their-turn-to

• Patrick Collison on X: https://x.com/patrickc

• Stripe: https://stripe.com

• Remind: https://www.remind.com

• Zach Abrams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharyabrams

• Brex: https://www.brex.com

• Bridge: https://www.bridge.xyz

• Superhuman’s secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/superhumans-secret-to-success-rahul-vohra

• Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-30-years-of-building

• The Enneagram Institute: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com

• How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/build-robust-relationships-carole-robin

• How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/jerry-colonna

• How Netflix builds a culture of excellence | Elizabeth Stone (CTO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-netflix-builds-a-culture-of-excellence

• What Is PeopleFirst?: https://alpineinvestors.com/story/what-is-peoplefirst

• How to break out of autopilot and create the life you want | Graham Weaver (Stanford GSB professor, founder of Alpine Investors): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-break-out-of-autopilot-graham-weaver

• Granola: https://www.granola.ai

• KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81498621

• Loom: https://www.loom.com

• Joseph Campbell’s quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21396-if-you-can-see-your-path-laid-out-in-front

• Wes Anderson’s short films (Roald Dahl) on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/wes-anderson-netflix-short-films

Recommended books:

• Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships: https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships/dp/189200528X

• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success: https://www.amazon.com/15-Commitments-Conscious-Leadership-Sustainable/dp/0990976904

• Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Your-Life-Well-Lived-Joyful/dp/1101875321

• Roald Dahl books: https://www.amazon.com/Roald-Dahl-Collection-Books-Box/dp/0241377293

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

Irish software engineer Addy Osmani is not opposed to vibe coding. And yet this Google Gemini developer (who is also working on Chrome) has a keen sense of AI’s limitations too.

“We use vibe coding at Google as well — I find it great for prototypes, MVPs, really good for learning…” Osmani said on a podcast in early November. “But for the most part, vibe coding is prioritizing speed and exploration over things like correctness and maintainability.”

Osmani was speaking on the podcast for Zed Industries (a company founded in 2022 to build tools for programmers — and to resurrect the popular Atom text editor as “Zed”). And he has a unique vantage point for how AI is impacting the coding world, both from watching Google’s adoption of AI tools, and from reports from around the industry.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in April that “well over 30%” of the code that’s checked in at Google is “people accepting AI-suggested solutions.” That same month CNBC reported Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s estimate that “maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software.”

But is AI creating more problems along the way, leaving coders to face longer code reviews and a new set of challenges as they try to solve the remaining bits, “the 70% problem”?

The Deceptively Convincing Nature of AI-Generated Code

In short, AI can rapidly produce much of the code for an app, for a feature, Osmani said on the podcast, but the scaffolding, the obvious patterns, can be just as time-consuming as it ever was. This includes crucial details like how to integrate with production systems, plus “your auth, your security, your API keys…”, as well as edge cases and things that need additional debugging.

Getting a UI with a few prompts is “deceptively convincing… You can get something that looks like it’s functional. But it can be held together with duct tape behind the scenes, for all you know.”

This may be reflected in the latest developer surveys. “While adoption is in a really good place, trust is surprisingly low, and it’s declining…” Osmani added. “There are lots of studies, including [Google’s] DORA AI report, which showed that while adoption is up, trust is really down… Favorable views about AI coding dropped from 70 to 60 percent within two years. And about 30% of people are reporting little to no trust in AI-generated code at all.

“Which is kind of wild, given how much we’re kind of relying on this now…”

In September, Osmani published a new book called “Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming.”

Solving the ‘70% Problem’ in AI-Assisted Programming

So how should developers tackle that final 70%? Osmani says one fundamental step is “taking the time to go back and understand what was generated.”

Maybe there’s a newly popular software design pattern, Osmani suggests — the “two steps back” pattern. (“You’re feeling good” after using prompts in your favorite tool to generate a minimum viable product, and try “throwing two or three more prompts at it,” Osmani explains…) This typically leads to a point where small changes — say, fixing a bug — somehow make things worse.

“The fix is going to break something else, you’re going to ask AI to fix that issue, and it’s going to create two more problems. Rinse, repeat. Sometimes it’s five new problems.”

Besides having variable-validating checkbacks and the ability to rollback to prior states, Osmani thinks developers still also need to be prepared to modify their codebase themselves. “This starts with understanding the generated code.”

This ultimately suggests a larger problem with our workflows. He’s also read articles warning about “using AI as a crutch” — the possibility that we don’t understand more than just our current codebase. “Our fundamental critical thinking skills, our ability to learn from making mistakes, is kind of disappearing or it’s being eroded.”

At September’s Lead Dev conference in New York, Osmani asked whether teams should try AI-free sprint days, “just to keep those skills sharp.”

But another idea is creating a file capturing decisions made along the way and the lessons learned, maybe by asking the agent to “distill insights after every single task”. For your AI agent, this forms a “compounding learning loop” — but it does more than just improve the quality of your next round of AI prompts. It’s become a kind of memory anchor for you, “a file that you can go back to and learn…”

The Importance of Better Context Engineering

This leads to his next suggestion, which addresses the “70% problem” more directly. “I do find that investing in fully understanding what context engineering means is really, really useful,” Osmani said. AI tools generate better code if they’re given all the relevant background on a project.

One Anthropic document points out that context includes message history but also system instructions, as well as external data and how tools are connected to external systems.

Osmani says it’s “making sure that your model, your agent, your tools have got all of the information needed to be able to successfully accomplish a task. It’s about going beyond just ‘prompting and praying’ to giving it as much information as you can optimally fit within your context window to increase the chances that things are actually going to work out well…”

“For a lot of the tools people are using these days, I think it is now a little bit easier to be able to pull in that context — so docs, URLs, examples, any of these markdown files that might have additional context about the problems or your codebase or how your team works.

“That is something I think is useful for people to also keep in mind if they’re trying to get beyond that 70% point.”

This also means that writing tests for code can become even more important, since they can double as a feedback loop for AI agents, Osmani said at Lead Dev.

Still, here the same caution applies: A human needs a strong understanding of any tests being generated by AI. “Tests are a safety net. They de-risk AI coding. And I tend to think that if you’re lucky, your team has been investing in tests for quite some time.

“If you don’t have decent test coverage, it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that someone’s going to say, ‘Well, yeah, we can just use AI to write the tests for us.’ And that’s okay, as long as there is still a human in the loop that is reviewing those tests.

“Because if you think you’re going to just prompt yourself out of the problem, I worry.” (He laughs.) “I worry for you, friend…”

Does AI-Assisted Coding Really Save Time?

So in the end, are coders more productive using AI tools? Osmani has seen estimates based on self-reported productivity gains, an internal Google survey, and even metrics on the lines of code written by AI — but believes the true gain is… less than 2x. “This is a topic I feel very strongly about,” he says.

When someone on Twitter reports wildly higher numbers, “if you zoom in, often those are companies that are doing greenfield development on something completely fresh. They don’t have technical debt, they don’t have all of the baggage that usually comes with traditional software engineering, on something that is real and has existed for a while. And if you’re building something from scratch, you’re probably not going to have quite as much inherent complexity from the start.”

How Code Review Is Becoming the New Bottleneck

How does that play out in the real world? “Maybe they can complete 20% more tasks than they could before. But we’re also starting to see side effects of some of these, too… Using AI to increase velocity means that more code is being thrown over the wall, and someone has to review it. We’re actually starting to see that code review is becoming the new bottleneck…. That’s going to be an interesting challenge, because we tend to have finite senior engineers, often, who are reviewing this code. And they’re going to have finite time… I don’t think the patterns for code review have fully evolved for this moment just yet.”

Having said all that, there are some ways AI can be truly useful. Agents are “actually really powerful as just a learning buddy” — maybe chatting with it on a break from coding, seeking fresh perspectives and better approaches. Osmani uses it when returning to an old codebase. “Sometimes you will think that you have a good mental model of how a system works, but there are almost always going to be things that you maybe missed or that other people added over time… Trying to use AI to form more of those connections — more of the nodes — I think can be really, really powerful, just as a learning aid.”

And after talking to different companies developing tools, Osmani says, “Something that is on the horizon is how can we start to offer proactive AI coding suggestions…”

Though he thinks it will take some time before tools like that could mature into something we’re using every day…

WebReduce

• IBM announces and demos their new “agentic IDE“, calling it an “AI-first IDE” that can “coordinate specialized agents…”
• Swift/Mojo creator Chris Lattner discusses where Mojo (and Python) fit in the world of AI.
• Co-founder of major game studio Rockstar on whether LLMs can write video games — and his own perspective on how AI will change the world.
• Are employees using AI a new IT threat? AI use is high, but “policy compliance is low” as unapproved apps and personal devices create “shadow IT” attack surfaces.

The post Is AI Creating a New Code Review Bottleneck for Senior Engineers? appeared first on The New Stack.

Announcing Files Preview v4.0.19 for users of the preview version.

Under Pressure: How Queueing Systems Handle Backpressure with Examples in C#