Is it possible to delete System Restore points?

[Binoculars]

Binoette3, in an attempt to free up some space on her ageing laptop with 20Gb HDD, removed a program which she used for downloading music. Alas, all her music disappeared with the program. This is, as you can imagine, a tragedy of epic proportions and the tears are flowing copiously.

I told her to try a system restore, but the calendar won't let her choose last month, I assume because the available space for restore points is full. Her settings are set to Max space already, so I was wondering if it were possible to delete this month's restore points. Would that work or have the previous restore points gone forever?

Any other suggestions?

[dj Mcrae]

Hmm I think your in a bit of a bind and wont be able to use SYSRST to gain back that data anyway....

You can try data recovery though ...

Here is a program I used to recover My own crashed external hard drive. There are others that do similar

> EasyRecovery Professional. It scans hard drives of various systems FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS for RAW images and transposes RAW data back into working files . I managed to retrieve deleted data as well the lost partition tree... I have also used it numerous times on my customers systems to retrieve their sensitive accidental lost documents .

Goodluck

dj


edit additional : My suggestion is to Dload a trial of it here and see if it finds your music. Then make a decision about obtaining it if it finds the required info: http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-downloads/

[BOAC]

As dj says, there are numerous (and several free) progs which will enable her to recover at least some of the music assuming the disk space has not been over-written since delete. Google.

As far as restore points go, you can delete what you like (I'm not sure about the last, though) but be VERY SURE you don't delete the very one/ones you need.

Sysrestore is NOT like a back up. She needs to back up the music to CD, DVD or other to be safe.

[Parapunter]

Looking forward, it's a good idea to back up precious files to a separate disk. I use Acronis true image to make a dailoy backup of my system, so that if it goes bang, I can fire the backup over a fresh install & it's all back to normal.

[Tarq57]

As above. System restore won't store the files, only the settings for the applications/registry entries that were current at the time.
What was the music program concerned, and have you any idea what file path it accessed the music from? It may, if she's fortunate, have left a folder behind that contains the music. Do a computer search for one of the file names (Say, "Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Relax.mp3") that you/she knows for sure was there. If it is still anywhere, that method has a chance to locate it.
If they have been deleted with the uninstall, a recovery program is the only answer.Don't use the computer too much (that is, install or uninstall programs, browse the web, delete temp files, that sort of thing) as it increases the chance the files will be overwritten, making recovery more difficult. You will, of course, need to install the recovery program. If you can install it to a different partition than the music program was on, that would be best, but from the sound of it it's unlikely that HD would have been partitioned.

[dj Mcrae]

A little bit easier for the search Targ mentioned would be to use a wildcard search Eg. typed as *.mp3 instead of the name of the song... It will save trying to remember actual exact characters in the titles and find any MP3 listed and its destination.

[Tarq57]

True...:O
(BTW, It's Tarq, not Targ. The "Q" in lower case does look a bit like a "G")

[dj Mcrae]

:ooh: lol Sorry about that ... ^^^^^ on my screen and skin it totally looks like g

[frostbite]

The less you write/have written to the HD since the disaster, the better your chances of recovery.

[Parapunter]

This is true, files aren't deleted upon deletion, the sectors they reside in on the hard disk are marked for overwriting, so that the more you use the machine, the more of those files are overwritten & therefore permanently lost.

[Ministry_Cork]

As an I.T professional i would sugest searching for the files first. As it very common with users of average knowledge of PC's the deletion of the program does not delete the music, rather it removed the familiar way the user used to find them. Try searching for *mp3 on all drives and see what turns up. There is a small chance that the music is actaully deleted in which case the previously mentioned restore program should work a treat.