One pretty neat feature with virtual clients is that you can have restore-points. If you have ever used Hyper-V, you have probably used or seen the checkpoints which you could use to go back to a previous state. This kind of feature is available in other virtualization platforms as well, but Hyper-V is the one I’m familiar with. Citrix, being an old player in the VDI game, also offers this feature.
The restore point option is now also available for Windows 365 and your Cloud PC. Meaning that if you mess something up or manage to delete something really important you had stored locally, you can roll your device back to a previous state. Please be aware that this is stilla preview feature, so the final feature might not be the exact same things as shown in this post.
You can restore either as an admin, or have your end-user do the action. To allow your end-users to do this, you need to configure this setting.
If you enable this for your users, they can restore on a much tighter intervall than you can as an admin. You as an admin have 12 hour restore points, but you can configure for your end-users to be able to configure to have restore points every 4 hours.
Of course, if a backup is restored from a restore point, any data stored on the Cloud PC between the current time and restore point time will be lost.
Setting up user initiated restore
To configure the restore point service, navigate to Devices > Windows 365 and select the User Settings tab.
Press “+ Add” and give your profile a name.
In the “Point in time restore service” part of the profile, check the check-box for “Allow user to initiate restore service” and then select the frequency for your restore points.
Hit Next and assign your profile to a group of users, I’m assigning it to the group I’m using for my provisioning profile.
Press next to review your settings and than create the profile.
The user restore point service will only be available to users included in the group you have assigned the profile to.
Restoring as an admin
As an admin, you can restore Cloud PCs on a 12 hour interval. You can restore the Cloud PC by going to Devices > Windows > Windows devices and find your Cloud PC.
Once looking at the device, you can choose “Restore (preview)” from the ribbon and it will show you all available store points.
Once you click “Select” and confirm that you want to restore, the restore is initiated. If you look under Devices > Windows 365 and the All Cloud PCs tab, you will see that restore is in progress.
Restoring as an end-user
To restore my Cloud PC as an end-user, I need to brows to the Windows 365 portal, windows365.microsoft.com and sign in.
Once signed in, I will see my assigned Cloud PCs.
To initiate a restore, I simply click the gear icon on the Cloud PC I want to restore and select “Restore (preview)“.
Once I click that, I get this screen telling me as an end-user what will happen and I need to confirm that I really want to restore and then select which point.
Once I’ve clicked restore the Cloud PC will get a banner saying “Restoring Cloud PC” and which indicates that the process has started. I will see the same thing if a administrator has initiated a restore for me as well.
Once the restore has completed, my Cloud PC is ready to use again and will contain the same data as it did at the point in time of the restore point I selected.
