trying to restore my computer to an earlier date of like 2 months ago, but
will only give me the option to restore as early as the past 6 days- my
stepson accidentally deleted all of our music and i'm trying to get it
back-is there another way
System restore is not a backup utility; it does nothing to save data files.
It saves the registry and certain monitored system files. It's main use is
to recover the system from a botched software or driver install.
As Malke said, stop using the computer until you try some of the file
recovery utilities.
For the future you should establish some sort of regular backup, where
important data is saved to at least two kinds of media, CD, DVD, thumb drive
or what is most convenient, an external USB hard drive. There are a variety
of good backup programs. I recommend a drive imaging program. This can be
used to either clone the hard drive or creates a compressed image file of
the drive, which can then be restored if needed.
The programs that do this are:
Acronis True Image
Norton Ghost
Terabyte Unlimited's Image for Windows
CasperXP
I have not used any of these programs personally. I use a program called
Drive Image which was bought out by Symantec and incorporated in their Ghost
program. Many seem to recommend Acronis True Image.
There are also a variety of more traditional backup programs out there such
as
Stompsoft's PC Backup
Roxio's Backup MyPC.
Whatever you choose make sure you test it to know how and that it works on
your system, and how to restore from it, and then make backups regularly on
at least two different forms of backup media. All electronics has a finite
possibility of failure, hard drives die, computers crash and damage data,
fire, power irregularities, theft, etc. You must protect your important
data.
