Windows Restore Trashed My Computer!

[tommyk]

Recently I was getting a message saying "Failed to Connect to a Windows Service" so I did a little research and found that I could possibly solve the issue with Windows Restore. It stated no files, photos, documents, etc., would be lost.

I did a Windows Restore and lost EVERYTHING!

All software loaded and/or downloaded were gone, photos, files, Firefox Bookmarks gone, Thunderbird not working, Windows returned to the Tile Desktop, etc., etc., etc.

If that's not bad enough I get dozens of Windows Updates on a daily basis.

Is there anything I can do to restore my computer to it's settings before Windows Restore trashed everything?

[DanRaisch]

Moving to MozillaZine Tech as this is not a Firefox Support question.

[smsmith]

By no files, photos, documents, etc., it means the ones you have stored in your Documents folder, Photos, Music, etc. folders. The place where your Firefox bookmarks are kept is moved and a "clean" place is created. You can still recover the old data.

The computer I have restored previously is not the one I am on now, so you'll have to bear with my memory.

First, find out where Firefox stores profiles:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder

Then, find the new profile folder and the old profile folder. With Firefox closed, copy the files from the old profile to the new profile.

As I recall, the restore created a windows.old folder in C:\. Inside that folder was a Users folder, with a copy of each user that was on the system.

So, for me, the new profile is here:
C:\Users\userName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\my.profile.folder

And the old one was here:
C:\windows.old\Users\userName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\my.profile.folder (my profile folder may have a different name)

The same would be true in the case of Thunderbird, as well.

[Brummelchen]

i try to understand "system restore"
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... =windows-7

the german text told me that personal data is not overwritten/touched by restoring.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... =windows-7

What files are changed during a system restore?

System Restore affects Windows system files, programs, and registry settings. It can also make changes to scripts, batch files, and other types of executable files created under any user account on your computer. System Restore does not affect personal files, such as e-mail, documents, or photos, so it cannot help you restore a deleted file. If you have backups of your files, you can restore the files from a backup.

so i am not sure if he has used system restore rather than a recovery image from vendor. that only could explain.