How do I restore my backup without onecare?

I used one care for a while, it was good and all, no big complaints but I canceled my credit cards and decided to stop making expenses like antivirus and stuff like that, formated my computer, the year of my subscription ended and I didn't renew it.

Timed pass and I remembered I had an external USB hard drive in which I had made a backup with onecare when I was a subscriber. I know most backup programs back up the files in a specific format that can only be restored by the same program. I noticed onecare backed up the files in .zip mode so I didn't care, figuring I was going to be able to pull those files out again.

Well, to my surprise, (Dumb me for not taking notice of this) one care limits every zip file to 50mb.. so if I am backing up a movie that is 1gb long, it's actualy going to break down that file into many parts and store each part on a different .zip.

in other words. if I manualy restore those files in windows, I am going to end up with vacationmoviepart#1, vacationmoviepart#2, 3, 4 and so on. in other words, I can't put them back together!

I need help doing this and please, for the love of god, don't let your answer be "You need to pay for one care in order to restore your back up" cous this would be the worst way of cheating me out of my money!

I know most people would say "well every back up program out there charges you for it" and sadly enough, that's what the one care customer service guy said.. to which I replied. but not all of them charge you a yearly rate.. I can just buy the program and store it in a cd and I know its going to work 10 years from now if I reinstall it, I wont need to purchase another license just to restore my back up.

Instead of agreeing with me he just said "ah but with one care you get much more than back up! like defragmenting your computer and virus scan and tune ups!"

For a while I wanted him to shoot himself in the leg.. When he finaly understood what I was asking. he answered. well, onecare uses .zip as its back up format so you will be ok. then I told him about the files breaking down in different pieces and he said windows or winrar or any program out there should automaticaly notice the zip is incomplete and ask me for the next zips until the file is completed.. which he followed by saying "to my knowledge" which instantly made me realise he was full of crap. Because i've tried this before and it doesn't work like that. You just end up with your original file in different pieces. in other words. unusable.

He seemd to go away and told me to hold for a while and he finaly came back and gave me the miraculous solution.

If your subscription ends, you can still restore back ups with one care, as long as you don't uninstall it of course. if you reinstall again you wont be able to restore back up with the free trial.

by then I wanted him to shoot himself in both legs as I clearly stated that I had formated my computer and this was a back up I had done with one care long ago. Why will I keep onecare installed in my pc anyways? if I stoped paying for it it has to be for a reason, not to keep it around.

then he finaly said. Well if you want an automated restore and everything back the way you want it, then yes you need to pay for the full service of one care.

I feel your case has been solved, you agree with this?

BY then I do NOT want to tell you where I wanted him to shoot himself, I politely told him thank you, wrote a smiley face and loged off. Realising this man had 50% less knowledge of computers than me and he works for microsoft.


Can anyone here, please, for the love of god, tell me how to restore my back up without having to pay a cent for something I should not pay in the first place?

It's as if you went to the doctor and told you you were sick and charges his consults yearly. prescribes you a bunch of medicines with sideeffects. you drink the medicine, everything is fine and cancel his appointments for good. then a year later you realise the medicine is having side effects and you go to the same doctor and ask him to help you, not directly but at least tell you of another doctor who can help you and he says "nope, you need to pay my yearly feed or you are "insert bad word here"


It's just bad business.

Sorry for the rant, I hope anyone can help

Welcome to the Vista Forums

Unless I'm wrong, you should be able to restore your data through the normal backup and restore center. Hit start, type backup and look for backup and restore in the drop down menu. Click that and you *should* be able to restore your data (I could be *wrong*, has been known to happen )

You might also want to invest in a higher quality disk imager. It does more than backups and is worth every penny. Has saved me on a couple of occasions. Right now x64 members get 20% off by using this link: Acronis True Image - Vista

If this doesn't work for you, we'll gather some gurus and see what voodoo we can do!

You are completly right in telling me I should use a better back up program, the truth is, I rarely use back up programs, I dislike them. I rather not compress anything and manualy store everything in external drives. Because when restores go bad you are basicaly screwed, of course this is bad as well cos I dont get incremental back ups.

I use Nero's back it up for a while and it is very good, also used Norton's for a while but since I was using onecare at the time I figured I was going to use onecare's backup solution, as simple as it was, because I basicaly wanted a one click solution thing. defrag, virus scan, updates scan and incremental updates all in one click, and onecare seemed to be my favorite antivirus, specialy because of the hate of other antivirus like Norton.

I used the back up mainly for music videos and pictures.

as for the backup and restore in windows vista, i tried that and it doesnt even let me click restore because it doesnt find any back ups ever made by this machine. If I go advanced and click on "Back up made on another machine" it doesnt find anything in the external drive I used to back up with onecare

Ok, sorry about the backup restore recommendation. While I have Live OneCare myself, I don't let it do any of my backups.

Maybe, you could install the 90 day trial and recover your data that way. You may have to trick your OS into thinking it never had Live OneCare in the first place. Try uninstalling Live OneCare, delete its directories, and if you feel safe doing so, remove any references to it in your registry (be careful here). Then download and install it again, hopefully it will activate for the 90 day trial and you can retrieve your data.

For future backups without paying extra for anything, I'd use the backup and restore center by itself. Backups have proven to be invaluable to me, and I highly recommend them to others.

I hope this helps. Let us know how you progress.

Thanks for your continued support, the thing is, as stated by the customer support guy, the only way to restore with one care is if I am paying for it. If i download the trial, it wont let me access the back up options.

And as I said to him, I formated y pc long ago when I had onecare. this is a brand new build..

Ok!

I found a resource that talks about restoring backups made with Live OneCare without it being installed. Here's the link: Windows Live OneCare Help

I hope this helps.

thanks for finding that!

after reading where it says "without onecare installed" it seems not to make a lot of sense because the steps it gives are these

1. the files were backed up to an external hard drive, connect the hard drive to the computer.
2. If the files were backed up to a CD or DVD, locate the most recent disc of the backup collection (All of the backed-up files and associated data that Windows Live OneCare has stored for a computer in a given time period (usually a year), contained either on several backup discs or in a folder on an external hard drive. A backup collection is identified by the backup collection name, which contains the computer's name and the year. ) that contains the files you want to restore, and then insert the disc into your disc drive.
3. When you insert a disc, the Restore dialog box opens. If it does not appear or you are restoring from an external hard drive, start the Windows Live OneCare Restore program:
4. Click Start, and then click My Computer.
5. In the folder list, open the drive that contains the Windows Live OneCare Backup disc or external drive.
6. Double-click the Restore icon to start the Windows Live OneCare Restore program.
7. Click Browse to view the backup files in Windows Explorer.
8. On the View menu, point to Explorer Bar, and then click Search. A Search Companion window opens.
9. Click All files and folders, and then type the name of the file that you are looking for.
10. In the search results, right-click your file, then select Copy.
11. Paste the file in the location that you want.

I am supposed not to have onecare installed yet its telling me to run the onecare restore program...

kuhne <kuhne.36tld3@xxxxxx-mx.forums.net> wrote:
I scanned your posts, but I am looking that them on the Microsoft news server
and I don't see the posts that you are replying to within the thread.

This free utility can rejoin the parts:
http://www.freebyte.com/hjsplit/
-steve
--
Stephen Boots sboots@xxxxxx
Microsoft MVP - Windows Live
Windows Live OneCare Forum Moderator
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowso....aspx?siteid=2

This functionality was removed from OneCare in v1.5, I believe. Version 1
allowed a restore from CD with a utility burned to CD1 of the set. This utility
did not get written to external disks. They changed to utility to prompt you to
install OneCare.
-steve

kuhne <kuhne.36tz94@xxxxxx-mx.forums.net> wrote:
--
Stephen Boots sboots@xxxxxx
Microsoft MVP - Windows Live
Windows Live OneCare Forum Moderator
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowso....aspx?siteid=2

I don't know what you mean by this but thanks a lot for giving me that app Stephen, I will try it now!



and Joe, thanks for baring with me on my endless rants.