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General discussion

Help! I did factory restore on Vista insteadofsystemrestore!

Apr 7, 2011 6:52AM PDT

So my internet wasn't working and i thought i was doing system restore where it says,"restore your pc to an earlier date" but i did factory restore instead. Does anybody know any way I can get my files back? any partition programs that are effective. I am mostly worried about my photos because I didn't burn them on disks.

Discussion is locked

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Depends
Apr 7, 2011 10:35AM PDT

Depends on if the restore program formatted the drive. If it did, odds are the act of installing the OS again means some of those files, maybe even all of them, are gone. Short of some very expensive recovery services, gone forever.

If it didn't format the drive, just installed a fresh copy of the OS over top your existing one, the files should still be there if you go looking.

Either way, this should be taken as an important lesson on the value of backups.

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i did format it though
Apr 7, 2011 11:07AM PDT

i did factory restore

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Not all factory restores format
Apr 7, 2011 12:34PM PDT

Not all factory restores format, some merely install over top. If yours formatted, in short: your screwed. Every time you've written a file on that drive since that factory restore, you've potentially destroyed the remains of the files you want to recover. So if you've already gone about restoring all your programs and done some web browsing, just forget it, the files are gone. Recovery services would cost thousands of dollars, so unless the files are worth that kind of money to you, they're gone. Make sure that from this point forward you make regular backups of any and all important data.