System Restore

[johnnyBravo1]

My friend accidentally deleted 3 folders from his desktop on his Windows XP Pro dell laptop, I ran system restore and everything came back to the restore point date I chose, the three folders showed up on the desktop, but the folders were empty, they had subfolders within the 3 folders but no files were in any of them. Any way to get those files back. Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[bcastner]

The folder structure was preserved by System Restore because it was in his profile. The files were not restored because System Restore only monitors a select group of file extensions; these extensions do not include most of the extensions used by application software such as the Microsofot Office product suite.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sr/sr/monitored_file_extensions.asp

System Restore is not a substitute for a good backup routine. It does not do a system state preservation. See: Frequently Asked Questions About System Restore

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sr/sr/monitored_file_extensions.asp

Done rant.

You need to explore any of the sofwares designed to "undelete" files in Windows. Some freeware utilities I have used:

PC Inspector:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

Restoration

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

Free Undelete

http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/

 

[johnnyBravo1]

Thanks a lot, great info on this post!

 

[bcastner]

You are very welcome.
Good luck.

Best,
Bill Castner