recovering files after system recovery?

K

keira

is there a way to recovery files after doing a system recovery? i saved some
files.. but forgot a few of them stashed away in a folder. no physical
damage on the drive at all, just a restore for the settings.

any help asap would be great.
 
B

Brian Bradley

keira said:
is there a way to recovery files after doing a system recovery? i saved
some
files.. but forgot a few of them stashed away in a folder. no physical
damage on the drive at all, just a restore for the settings.

any help asap would be great.

Restore and recovery usually mean different things.

A system restore is done from within Vista and restores your system to the
way it was at an earlier date without harming personal folders and files.

A system recovery is usually thought of as returning the PC to its original
factory state by overwriting the hard drive with a fresh image from a
(sometimes hidden) recovery partition on the hard drive or from a recovery
CD or DVD set provided by the manufacturer or created by the user. A system
recovery can be initiated several ways, such as by pressing a key at boot
time, by booting from a recovery CD/DVD, or sometimes from within a
factory-provided program in Vista.

A fresh reinstall or repair of Vista can be accomplished using a Vista DVD,
and is sometimes called a restore or recovery but should probably be called
just a reinstall or repair.

You used both "recovery" and "restore." Which type of recovery, restore,
reinstall or repair did you perform?

If you did a system restore, your files should be where they were at the
time you "rolled back" to.

If you did a system repair, your files should be where you last left them.

If you did other than a system restore or system repair, you'll need some
sort of file recovery utility to recover the files, and it remains to be
seen how successful you will be or how time consuming that process will be.
(It's time to ask yourself how much you really need those files.)

I hope someone else will chime in with other ideas, especially if I'm
missing something, but we still need to know exactly what you did before we
can be of more specific help.
 
K

keira

It was the system recovery discs that was used, it's an hp computer so there
isn't a vista dvd.
 
M

Malke

keira said:
It was the system recovery discs that was used, it's an hp computer so there
isn't a vista dvd.

Depending on where the files were and whether the new image (your
recovery) overwrote them, you may be able to get the data. It's not a
very good chance, but most recovery software will allow you to try
before you buy, and a few programs are free.

Stop using the computer immediately because that decreases the chances
of retrieving the data. If you use data recovery software, install it on
another machine and either use it from that operating system or create a
bootable cd/floppy and work with that. If you don't have the skill
and/or equipment to do these procedures and the data is crucial, take
the machine to a professional computer repair shop that has experience
in doing data recovery. This will not be your local version of
BigStoreUSA. In-shop data recovery is usually not exactly cheap (for
ex., my charges are generally $150-350USD), but it costs less than
sending the drive to a professional data recovery company such as Drive
Savers.

http://www3.telus.net/mikebike/RESTORATION.html
PCInspector File Recovery -
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/welcome.htm
Executive Software “Undelete” -
http://www.undelete.com/undelete/undelete.asp
R-Studio - http://www.r-tt.com/
File Scavenger - http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm
Ontrack's EasyRecovery - http://www.ontrack.com/software/


Malke
 

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