Hi
I did a system restore (back to factory settings, no user data saved) on my girlfriend's laptop yesterday. Before I started the restore I copied all her documents, photos, etc. from her desktop onto an external HDD - this worked fine. I then copied everything under her user folder, i.e. Documents, Contacts, Music, Photos, Videos, etc. to the external HDD - this all seemed to work fine, the copy/paste process did not report any problems.
However I didn't check every subfolder had been copied and have now (unfortunately post-restore) found out that some of the sub folders (specifically the folders which have the blue icon - Documents, Music, etc) under the user folder have not been copied. Strangely the AppData folder has been copied, as have other user-created folders and also the files which resided in the user folder (which were not in sub-folders). It would seem that Vista has decided not to copy these folders for a reason. I was logged in with my girlfriend's account which has admin rights so shouldn't have had a problem with security.
I tried copying the user folder to the external HDD after the restore and it seemed to work ok, unfortunately not when I needed it.
Does anyone have any ideas what could have caused this and whether it can be prevented, for future reference? A long shot but is there anything that can be done - are these folders lurking somewhere on the external HDD but can't be seen?
Any help would be greatly appreciated as she has lost quite a bit of data. I've tried undelete but it seems that the restore format process was very effective!
Thanks in advance,
Richard
I did a system restore (back to factory settings, no user data saved) on my girlfriend's laptop yesterday. Before I started the restore I copied all her documents, photos, etc. from her desktop onto an external HDD - this worked fine. I then copied everything under her user folder, i.e. Documents, Contacts, Music, Photos, Videos, etc. to the external HDD - this all seemed to work fine, the copy/paste process did not report any problems.
However I didn't check every subfolder had been copied and have now (unfortunately post-restore) found out that some of the sub folders (specifically the folders which have the blue icon - Documents, Music, etc) under the user folder have not been copied. Strangely the AppData folder has been copied, as have other user-created folders and also the files which resided in the user folder (which were not in sub-folders). It would seem that Vista has decided not to copy these folders for a reason. I was logged in with my girlfriend's account which has admin rights so shouldn't have had a problem with security.
I tried copying the user folder to the external HDD after the restore and it seemed to work ok, unfortunately not when I needed it.
Does anyone have any ideas what could have caused this and whether it can be prevented, for future reference? A long shot but is there anything that can be done - are these folders lurking somewhere on the external HDD but can't be seen?
Any help would be greatly appreciated as she has lost quite a bit of data. I've tried undelete but it seems that the restore format process was very effective!
Thanks in advance,
Richard
