Microsoft Recall is Coming Back? Here's What You Need to Know

Isabella Shinn

Updated: May 21, 2025

According to this Blog, Recall will be further optimized and may be included in future stable versions. In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about Recall. Let’s take a look!

• What is Recall?
• How to Use Recall?
• Will Recall Replace Backup?
• TL;DR

What is Recall?

Recall is an AI-powered feature first introduced by Microsoft in 2024 alongside Copilot+ PCs.

Its goal is to help users “recall” past on-screen activity — essentially acting like a memory replay system. It's a locally stored timeline of your computer usage, enhanced with AI for contextual understanding and semantic search.

It's just kind of like Clarity-the recording function. Next 4 details will make you know more about it.

Automatic Snapshots

Recall automatically captures a snapshot of your screen every ~5 seconds. These images are stored locally and can include websites, text, apps, buttons, chat logs, and more.

AI Semantic Search

Users can search naturally using queries like “the red shoes website I browsed last week” or “the article about making better pasta.” Recall searches your history and surfaces relevant content using AI.

Timeline Browsing

You can scroll through a visual timeline to revisit your digital past, similar to scrubbing through a video player.

Screen Replay + Interaction

Recall lets you extract text, reopen links, or navigate back to file paths — it’s more than just viewing old screenshots.

Although Recall is designed to enhance productivity and memory retrieval, it's not a data backup or recovery tool. It helps you recall rather than restore. This distinction has raised concerns over privacy, storage consumption, and performance. Microsoft clarified that all snapshot data is stored locally, not uploaded to the cloud, and is not used for ads or marketing. Users can delete snapshots or turn off Recall at any time.

How to Use Recall?

Recall requires high hardware specifications. Here are the official system requirements from Microsoft:

If your PC meets the requirements and you're running Build 26200.5600, launch Recall by pressing Win + J or find it in Start > All Apps > Recall.

Will Recall Replace Backup?

While Recall helps you remember what you saw, it doesn’t preserve your actual files. If you:

• Delete a document
• Wipe your drive
• Suffer a system crash

Recall won’t be able to recover those files.

At iSumsoft, we build tools that complement technologies like Recall.

iSumsoft Data Refixer is designed to:

• Recover deleted, lost, and formatted files with one click
• Support recovery from formatted or damaged drives
• Achieve high success rates for data recovery

If you're in trouble with data issues, try it TODAY!

iSumsoft Data Refixer

Recover deleted, lost, and formatted data

• Retrieve deleted files even if Recycle Bin is emptied.
• Support formatted/damaged drive data recovery.
• Support NTFS and FAT32 file systems.
• Recover lost data with a high success rate.
• Support 500+ file types

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TL;DR

Windows Recall helps you remember what you did.
iSumsoft Data Refixer helps you get your data back.

Don’t just remember what you did, it is more important to make sure you can recover it.