So, a 7-year old desktop we've had apparently crashed while my kid was doing his homework. When it rebooted, it restored to a point from 2010. No subsequent restore point exists. Have I lost five years of data? Is there something anyone can do?
How badly have I screwed up?
- Thread starter JayMags71
- Start date
System restore is not supposed to erase data. It simply restores the underlying system to an earlier time.
If you lost files something else is going on. I suspect that something unusual is going on because restoring to 5 years ago is ... very odd.
If you lost files something else is going on. I suspect that something unusual is going on because restoring to 5 years ago is ... very odd.
It also depends on the restore. Depending on the manufacturer there are other 'helpful' utilities that allow you to restore to a factory default condition. The only reason I think that may be the case is the five year restore is a LONG time ago.
Anyhow, a good PC could probably recover the files if they were deleted. Recuva is free and works well.
Anyhow, a good PC could probably recover the files if they were deleted. Recuva is free and works well.
If you're trying to recover data yourself, if at all possible, pull the hdd and use another machine to recover. Every write you do now could destroy many files you want to recover.
OK. I'm bringing to an independent guy to take a look at it. I just wanted to make sure it won't be a waste of money.
When you get it back, you may want to think about buying an external drive and running Crashplan.
(I wish I'd been running Crashplan a month or so ago...)
(I wish I'd been running Crashplan a month or so ago...)
I know this is too late for you, but everyone should get an external drive and copy everything to it regularly. $100 for a drive seeks like a waste until you have a crash; then it's a bargain.<br />
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I'm not trying to call you out, I suffered a few crashes and lost data before I realized how much money a good backup is worth.
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I'm not trying to call you out, I suffered a few crashes and lost data before I realized how much money a good backup is worth.
jayhoz said:
I prefer imaging drives, especially your boot drive obviously. There is nothing wrong with the imaging program still buried in every version of Windows...except it's slow...deadly slow... imaging a boot drive with 50 Gig on it, from an SSD to a fast internal 7200rpm HD still takes 40 mins. The imaging utility in Active@ Data Studio does the same thing in just under 10 minutes. Others I have used that are equally fast are Macrium Reflect, and Paragon Hard Disk Manager. EASUS ToDo is also fine, but it installs/locks itself to the specific box you install it upon, which is a pain if you want to move it to a new build.
If you just want to make ultra compact backups of specific dirs, while not fully automated, the features in Winrar make it very easy to create a very compact backup file and then update it.
I think what I want to be able to do is automatically copy important files from the PCs on the network to my media server which is set up in RAID. That would effectively put everything on 3 drives in 2 machines. I've used Acronis to do this in the past, but it seemed a little clunky. Maybe I will dust that off and try again.
jayhoz said:
Yeah, Acronis was one of the first, it IS clunky and I have avoided it for years because it also does something I and many others believe is a big no-no: it modifies the OS kernal. It's functionality can be accomplished without doing that, none of the others mentioned do that, and most I mentioned are now faster and more flexible than Acronis. In addition, Acronis was the first to offer the option to reinstall a boot image to different hardware...but there were 2 problems: 1. It was sold as a separate extra which was confusing and 2. It didn't work. I admit I haven't looked at recent versions of Acronis, but with so many other options that are cheaper, faster and do work....
I image the boot drives on my Windows machines using Macrium Reflect and have Crashplan running on my user data.
Is there a "Tech for Dummies" site that can actually help me understand all of the things said in this post (and other posts)? Couperin47 has been an amazing resource on all things tech, and I truly appreciate the time he spends here...but as one of the less technologically savvy members of the board, it would be great if some site or sites exist that explain (in a very remedial way) things discussed here. In just this post alone, I'd have to look up the following:Couperin47 said:
-imaging drives
-boot drives
-50 Gig
-SSD
-fast internal 7200rpm HD (and what is it)
-Active@ Data Studio
-installs/locks itself to the specific box
You're not going to get answers like that on a single site (outside of wikipedia). Much of that is really basic stuff. You should start a thread where people can ask any tech questions without judgement but until then I'll take a swag at answering your questions. The answers will likely lead to more questions though:
-imaging drives - To copy a hard drive byte for byte, rather than file for file. It can include things like boot information and OS information essentially allowing you to create a mirror copy of a system.
-boot drives - Generally referring to a distinct hard drive used just to run the Operating System. User files and programs would be kept on a different drive
-50 Gig - 50 Gigabytes. 5000 Megabytes. 5000000 Kilobytes. You get the picture
-SSD - Solid State Drive. This is a hard drive with no moving parts. It has very fast writes and extremely fast reads making it much more performant than spinning disk based hard drives. Due to being relatively new they are still much more expensive per gigabyte than spinning disks.
-fast internal 7200rpm HD (and what is it) - It's another type of hard drive. This is the spinning disk type referenced above. It has a bunch of magnetic platters that spin, in this case at 7200 rpm. It's like a stacked magnetic turntable for storing data.
-Active@ Data Studio - This is a software package for doing many things involving backing up and restoring data.
-installs/locks itself to the specific box - In reference to your first item, many images can be tied to the hardware they were taken on. Good imaging programs can break that reliance so you can restore an image from one set of hardware onto another.
-imaging drives - To copy a hard drive byte for byte, rather than file for file. It can include things like boot information and OS information essentially allowing you to create a mirror copy of a system.
-boot drives - Generally referring to a distinct hard drive used just to run the Operating System. User files and programs would be kept on a different drive
-50 Gig - 50 Gigabytes. 5000 Megabytes. 5000000 Kilobytes. You get the picture
-SSD - Solid State Drive. This is a hard drive with no moving parts. It has very fast writes and extremely fast reads making it much more performant than spinning disk based hard drives. Due to being relatively new they are still much more expensive per gigabyte than spinning disks.
-fast internal 7200rpm HD (and what is it) - It's another type of hard drive. This is the spinning disk type referenced above. It has a bunch of magnetic platters that spin, in this case at 7200 rpm. It's like a stacked magnetic turntable for storing data.
-Active@ Data Studio - This is a software package for doing many things involving backing up and restoring data.
-installs/locks itself to the specific box - In reference to your first item, many images can be tied to the hardware they were taken on. Good imaging programs can break that reliance so you can restore an image from one set of hardware onto another.
Among many other sites, PCWorld, PCMag, CNET, and About.com all have some resources for more general audiences. HowStuffWorks also has a computers section.
Imaging refers to taking an exact snapshot of a hard drive as it currently exists and writing it off (to another hard drive or DVDs or CDs) into a single file or a small set of files known as the disk image. Typically a good deal of data compression is involved, so the image takes up a smaller amount of storage space than the data on the original hard drive. For example, a hard drive with 30 gigabytes of data on it can be imaged onto a handful of DVDs. Having an image handy is great for disaster recovery if a hard drive fails or is otherwise corrupted via malware or balky software install. For the former, you would plug in a new hard drive and restore the image from the failed drive to it. For the latter, you would use the image to overwrite the corrupted hard drive back to its fully functional state.
Boot drive = the hard drive that your computer operating system (could be Windows, Apple, Linux, etc.) is installed on that gets read and loaded every time you turn on the PC. Most consumer PCs have only one hard drive installed inside the box, but a PC can have multiple internal hard drives. External hard drives are also common these days, and typically connect to a PC via a USB cable, but are usually just for extra storage space/backups and rarely used as boot drives.
50 GB? See this primer or this primer.
SSD = solid-state drive. These hard drives have only recently become available in the consumer realm. "Solid-state" means the drive has integrated circuits and no moving parts, and instead the drive is essentially a scaled-up version of one of those memory cards you would insert in a digital camera. SSDs tend to be faster than traditional hard drives (see next) and don't have mechanical parts to wear out.
The traditional technology (and still common) for hard drives were mechanical devices where the data (all zeroes and ones) were stored within metal oxide crystals coated on platters/disks that would spin around while a device known as a head would skate across the disks and either read existing data from the disks or write new data to them. Generally, the faster the platters spin, the faster the data can be served up to the computer. So a 7,200 RPM drive has disks within it spinning about 33% faster than in a 5,400 RPM drive.
Active@ Data Studio is a reference to a specific software suite that can create disk images.
"installs/locks itself to the specific box" = the image file(s) created by the imaging software can only be restored to the specific PC, aka box, that the image was created from. Other imaging software can let you port an image from one machine to another.
Imaging refers to taking an exact snapshot of a hard drive as it currently exists and writing it off (to another hard drive or DVDs or CDs) into a single file or a small set of files known as the disk image. Typically a good deal of data compression is involved, so the image takes up a smaller amount of storage space than the data on the original hard drive. For example, a hard drive with 30 gigabytes of data on it can be imaged onto a handful of DVDs. Having an image handy is great for disaster recovery if a hard drive fails or is otherwise corrupted via malware or balky software install. For the former, you would plug in a new hard drive and restore the image from the failed drive to it. For the latter, you would use the image to overwrite the corrupted hard drive back to its fully functional state.
Boot drive = the hard drive that your computer operating system (could be Windows, Apple, Linux, etc.) is installed on that gets read and loaded every time you turn on the PC. Most consumer PCs have only one hard drive installed inside the box, but a PC can have multiple internal hard drives. External hard drives are also common these days, and typically connect to a PC via a USB cable, but are usually just for extra storage space/backups and rarely used as boot drives.
50 GB? See this primer or this primer.
SSD = solid-state drive. These hard drives have only recently become available in the consumer realm. "Solid-state" means the drive has integrated circuits and no moving parts, and instead the drive is essentially a scaled-up version of one of those memory cards you would insert in a digital camera. SSDs tend to be faster than traditional hard drives (see next) and don't have mechanical parts to wear out.
The traditional technology (and still common) for hard drives were mechanical devices where the data (all zeroes and ones) were stored within metal oxide crystals coated on platters/disks that would spin around while a device known as a head would skate across the disks and either read existing data from the disks or write new data to them. Generally, the faster the platters spin, the faster the data can be served up to the computer. So a 7,200 RPM drive has disks within it spinning about 33% faster than in a 5,400 RPM drive.
Active@ Data Studio is a reference to a specific software suite that can create disk images.
"installs/locks itself to the specific box" = the image file(s) created by the imaging software can only be restored to the specific PC, aka box, that the image was created from. Other imaging software can let you port an image from one machine to another.
It's sobering to realize that in a tech forum like this, we do wind up communicating almost entirely in jargon. I imagine it must be like how I would feel trying to decipher threads in a cricket equivalent to SOSH ( I find the game incomprehensible and never had the time to learn it). The short answer is simply find any nerd at least 12 years old and let him explain it all to you....