On Mon, 10/28/2024 5:56 AM, Timatmarford wrote:
> On further examination, my backup hard drive does include W7 data! Each month has been compacted into one ginormous file!
>
> Now all I have to do is get my brain around handling and re-filing reams of *stuff*.
>
> How do others organise filing? W7 offered a list of headings but I have yet to find anything similar in W11.
>
> Can I simply save the most recent record and then search through for what I need?
>
On any recovery-type procedure, you need room to work.
A laptop for example, might only have the one port for a disk drive.
A desktop, you can place several drives inside it (if you have the
trays inside the thing). My Optiplex Refurb has room for two trays,
but only one tray is provided. This makes it rather useless as
my Technician machine. A good technician box would have room for
three disk drives. That's usually enough for a lot of surgery cases.
The reason for the "trays", is to do this. Now, some of this
can be done with USB enclosures for disk drives. But not a lot
of people have the nice enclosures available to do it that way.
Restoration target
(restore to the original <=== Win7 backup drive, restore basic image
drive, or place a store-bought
new drive in the technician machine) win7 restore, can run from a Windows Installer DVD troubleshooter section.
Restoration target
(restore to the original <=== Now, copy the up-to-date mail profile from the
drive, or place a store-bought original disk, onto the new disk. Copy the
new drive in the technician machine) current Downloads folder over. This step is
optional if the original drive was ruined/destroyed
In this way, you start with the backup from
three weeks ago, and add back any materials
collected since then. You need an up-to-date
email folder if using a POP3 account.
You have to think pretty carefully, where bits
and pieces are still hiding on the original drive,
to put everything back. The alternative would
be to make daily backups (I won't be doing that,
too lazy).
For example, a "bookmarks file" may be hiding in
the Firefox profile folder and needs to be restored.
There might only be a couple bookmarks more in
there, than the column on the left has.
Notice how in my picture, I handily managed to "invent"
a new drive on the left :-) The new drive must be at least
as big as the original drive - I don't think Win7 Backup
comes with a resize capability, but you can check and see.
The drives are generally pretty good on canonical size.
Two 1TB drives, tend to have the same byte count as each
other, which makes the software "very happy". You can also
restore onto a larger drive - the Windows 7 software has
to at least be clever enough to know that the secondary
GPT table needs to be moved up to the end of the new larger
drive, to work properly. The GPT partition tables are
redundant, two of them provided in case one is trashed.
I find that generally, the handling of those, isn't
all that good.
For a laptop drive, you can start with a desktop (physically
larger hard drive) and start your rebuilding process on the
desktop drive. Then, as a last step, you can clone the
1TB desktop to a brand new 1TB laptop drive. Then, install
the new laptop drive in the laptop bay.
Each VHD or VHDX file in the backup, is a single partition on the
original disk drive. Even if the restore software was broken,
don't panic, as with some work, you can clone the VHD file contents
to a new disk. You would likely want help with that. I haven't
needed to do that. Newer tried to rebuild a disk, from all those
tiny pieces in the backup folder.
Paul
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