Support Assist - STOP Automatic Backups

Question

I recently received an update to the Dell Support Assist Program (by PCDoctor). The update is LONG overdue, Dell Support Assist, as a program, has long been barely functional. I was happy to see that with the new update Dell Support Assist seemed to have been improved and was actually functioning as intended for the first time in several years. My issue now is that it automatically installs some more unnecessary Dell Bloatware on my computer. This includes Dell Support Assist Remediation and Recovery Assistant. So instantly Dell's bloatware automatically decides, without first asking if I was interested, that it will make and store backups of my PC. Why? I'm not sure. It's 2021, everything on my computer is backed up in the cloud. I have 0 use for a backup stored on my PC. Not to mention, if someone did need a backup in this day and age, Windows is itself perfectly capable of creating backups. So I open Support Assist uncheck the box that was automatically checked for me saying yes please make a bloated backup and recovery file and thought the problem was solved. But, alas, no. The next morning I wake up, turn on my computer and oh I get a notification that ANOTHER backup has been created. WHY?! No problem. I open up TreeSize, to examine closely all of the files and storage on my computer. Only to find to ~15gb in completely unwanted, useless, and bloated Dell Backup files that were not there previously. No problem right? Now that I have found the files backups I can simply delete them. WRONG! Dell puts them in some stupid protected system folder so I cannot even delete them with admin privileges. So I'm either stuck with ~15gb of completely useless unnecessary and unwanted backups or I have to wait until they are automatically deleted by Dells barely-functioning backup utility. I demand a solution now to delete these backups and prevent them from ever showing up on my computer again. I want this Bloatware permanently removed from my computer.

DELL-Cares · Answer

We tried reaching you on a private message asking for the Service Tag number to ascertain the warranty but did not receive a response. Please feel free to reply to the private message whenever you are available.

garioch7 · Answer

@Matt4905

I feel your pain. I found that SupportAssist SARemediation was chewing up 47 GB of my disk space, and growing. I used Revo Uninstaller Pro to remove SupportAssist entirely from my Dell XPS 8930 SE desktop, and on Friday I will remove SupportAssist from my Dell XPS 15 7590 laptop. I followed these instructions to remove the beast.

SupportAssist is disk space hog and it doesn't seem you can stop this beast from creating recovery snapshots, whether you want them or not. I image my computers weekly, so I don't need to be backing up SupportAssist snapshots.

I will never reinstall SupportAssist on my two Dell computers until, and unless, there is a way for the user to totally control whether recovery snapshots are created. One individual reported in this Forum that SARemediation had consumed 600 GB of his disk space! That is totally unacceptable, Dell.

Have a great day.

Regards,
-Phil

SupportAssist for PCs

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