Skip to main content

Applications don't work after recovering files from incremental backup

Thread needs solution

After virus infection, I restored partitions from an old full disk backup that I created after installing Windows but before installing most applications.

Then I recovered everything from a recent incremental/file folder of my entire C: drive.

I can see all my recent documents have been restored, and all of the newest applications are in the Program Files directory as expected, but if I try to launch any, they fail with various errors that suggest that they can't be found.

How can I make my applications work again?

0 Users found this helpful

You cannot restore a C:\ partition with a file based approach, except for non system content (ie you can use it to restore user files, but this is pretty much it). If you tried to restore anything in the C;\Windows or C:\Programs, etc. you will get in a world of trouble.

Thanks! So I should use my disk backup, re-install applications by hand, and then restore only my User directory, etc. from the incremental backup to get back to a working state?

Doug wrote:
of my entire C: drive.

Even that is often inadequate for a full disk restoration. You should create full disk mode backups, selecting the entire disk and not just C:. You may have necessary hidden partitions, and they might include the boot files.