dreen said:
I came home to find that my computer had crashed...i read the trouble
shooting guide and reinstalled my OS and now have lost everything in my
computer...is there a way to recover what is lost....it is acting like a
new
computer...empty
This is the wonderful thing about computers, no matter how old you are
you'll always learn something new. So what have we learned today? The
importance of making a backup image of your hard drive on a regular basis.
If you had made regular backups of your hard drive all you would have had to
do was simply do a restore from your latest backup and you wouldn't have
lost much. Just whatever changes had been made since the last backup and
that's all.
Though since you didn't and you did a restore, and I'm assuming it's an OEM
restore which formats the drive and restores the to PC to a state similar to
when you first turned it on, then you've lost everything. So now you have
the burden of reinstalling all the programs that you had before the restore,
ugh! With a backup, the PC would be in the same state it was in when the
backup was made, and you wouldn't have to reinstall anything. Just whatever
programs you had installed since the last backup.
So I would recommend buying the largest external USB hard drive that you can
afford, along with a backup program such as Acronis True Image and get in
the habit of making backups on a regular basis. You'll never know when
you'll need them! Another option would be to use one of the online data
backup services such as Carbonite.com where it would at least make backup
copies of your pictures, documents, and other user created data.
