Windows 11 Recall is misbehaving in testing, and the fix for the biggest issue is an age-old favorite: turn it off, then back on again

• Recall has a number of bugs in initial testing (unsurprisingly)
• One glitch means it isn’t saving snapshots
• The cure for that is to reboot the PC (and it’s the fix for another bug, too)

Windows 11’s controversial Recall feature is finally in play – well, in testing anyway – and some folks are encountering glitches, one of which has an age-old solution provided by Microsoft. Yes – turn it off, then turn it back on again.

As a quick reminder, when Recall was first revealed it caused a major storm on the privacy and security fronts, being an AI-driven powerful search feature (for Copilot+ PCs) that takes regular screenshots (called snapshots) of the activity on your PC (leveraging those grabs for its natural language search powers). It was then pulled, and delayed several times, before eventually being put back on the table by Microsoft last week.

One of the main problems some initial testers of Recall are now experiencing is a failure to save snapshots at all, as Tom Warren of The Verge complains about on Bluesky, as flagged by TweakTown.

CNBC further observed that right now, Recall can go for “several minutes” between taking the screenshots it uses to power its AI search, which can leave gaps in its timeline of snapshots, potentially weakening those search powers.

Microsoft has acknowledged the issue with snapshots being delayed, or not appearing at all, and advises a restart of the PC to cure the latter glitch.

In the known issues for the preview build carrying Recall (in the Dev channel for Windows Insiders), Microsoft advises: “Some users experience a delay before snapshots first appear in the timeline while using their device. If snapshots do not appear after 5 minutes, reboot your device. If saving snapshots is enabled, but you see snapshots are no longer being saved, reboot your device.”

Turn it off. Turn it on again.

Analysis: Expected problems

Recall has only just been deployed into testing, and with such a complex feature, we can expect teething problems. You might argue that Microsoft has been further…