Really need help with restoring a Backup!

So I got my new computer, and was going through the list of stuff to reinstall back onto it and pretty much got it done. Now I'm up to the data recovery part, for which I used Windows 7's own backup and restore utility to create a zip'd file of all my backup items.

Throughout the backup process I never encountered any problems, the backups have been saving successfully from my old computer to my external. Now that I try to retrieve them, it comes with an error in the restore process, that

Here's some prior information:

• This happens specifically to 3 main folders within the ~20 odd folders I have saved on this backup. The other folders backup fine, and only these 3 main (which include 100s of subfolders) have the problem). These 3 folders account for perhaps 60% of the backup file, ~100GB of the 169GB backup file.
• Folders in question are basically full of music that I have spent countless hours tagging to my likes (full album art etc.) and to me are VERY important.
• I have looked into the backup file and indeed is missing the "Backup files 3.zip", for which I have no clue why it is missing.
• Resetting the MediaID.bin has not worked.
• My old PC's name was "GAMING-PC" but my new one is just "Gaming-PC" non-caps (username is same on both).

So honestly, is there any hope to get these files recovered? I've done about an hour of googling and nothing comes up, only some mediaID.bin rebuild which is obviously not the problem. The entire problem lies within the "Backup files 3.zip" not being located. I could not just redownload the music, it is far too cumbersome for me to even think (15k songs).

 

backups should always be store in their own folder with nothing else in that folder or be nested in another folder, move the backup folder to the root of the drive it is on, see if can find it now.

 

nope, the backup was already stored in my externals path folder as "F:\BACKUP". this is most likely something to do with how the backup software failed to copy down ONE SINGLE zip file out of the 4-months I've been using the backup tool (the zip file missing is from earlier backup, 6-24 as you can see) and now I can't even restore any of my data within it due to that one small missing file (can be no more than 200mb due to zip constraints).

 

Sounds like you need a more flexible backup solution.

 

And you have lost access to the old computer ? Unfortunately, not much you can do as you have lost the content. Either you have hit a program bugs(due to size or too many level of path) or something is wrong during the transfer to external.

 

yes, the old laptop has been sold, and if desperate, i can ask to meet with the person i sold it to to try recover the files (since i only quick formatted the drive that contained the music) using some sort of file recovery program.

Is there really no hope in recovery 100gb worth of data (music in this case) just because ONE small 200mb .zip file is missing? is this honestly a limitation of software in 2011....

p.s. i'm staying away from windows backup, what do any of you recommend? I've used synctoy for most of my smaller files but figured backup would've been more appropriate for large music collection, i guess i went wrong there.

 

Since it was music, it was presumably already compressed. You gained nothing by Zipping it and now you may even have lost it. I know hindsight is 20-20 but I wouldn't have (and don't) zip or rar or otherwise 'archive' music or other already compressed files.

 

he was not zipping them. It is how Microsoft's backup did that.

 

Coulda, shoulda, woulda used drag and drop...

 

you know what the sad part is, i first used drag and drop (didn't even bother with synctoy) cuz i was in a rush, like 1-2hr before i met with the guy who was buying my laptop and usb 2.0 is slow as crap. 15mins before i was about to meet him somewhere, i find out that ~2300 files have been skipped because the file location was too long to be copied.

this is an example of one location

Basically...yea, I really like the way i organize my music by disography, album by year but the song names i never bother to change (only the id3tags in itunes, which im religious about).

so i tell the guy that i will sell it tomorrow, and instead of bothering with fixing up all the file names, i decided to use windows backup.

anyways to cut the story short, the only real way ive decided on how to go about this is to open up the backup folder with windows and go through each and every Discography folder (~150) until i see that it won't unpack because "backup files 3.zip" is missing. it's going to take a while but better than nothing, I've learned my lesson. Will use the Godfather program to clear up all my music file names to just "[track #] [title].mp3" and good riddance to windows backup.

 

You could go old-school (like I do) and just use tar for windows for backup.

 

Microsoft's backup is doing more than tar or dump copy. It keeps multiple copy and if I am not mistaken, is incremental. The multiple copy feature is quite handy in a few occasions for me.

It is still unclear if this incidence is really bug or other things.

 

i believe it is a bug, ive sifted through 10 google pages worth of this problem and none have a solution to this so as far as i know, it's not a very common bug but there isn't really anything to do if it does occur (other than a manual restore).

also in regards to the many copies, i actually didn't like that feature at all...I've had my discography organized and one day it was listed as say:

Bassnectar - Heads Up EP
Bassnectar Cozza Frenzy
etc etc

but i made changes to the file names later (a month later) to:

[2008] Bassnectar - Heads Up EP
[2009] Bassnectar - Cozza Frenzy
etc etc

When selecting which files to restore, I selected the entire "bassnectar discography" root file, and the restored files gives me all the original formats + the new "[year]" formats, effectively giving me duplicates. ofcourse i just delete them, but it is annoying when i told the backup manager to only give backups from 8-11-11 (most recent) and not 6-24-11..

On to my problem, i think i have it figured out. luckily as i was going through all the discography folders today, it seems that my "Chris Brown Discography" is the archive which was supposed to reside in Backup Files 3.zip, and therefore I just added all the other [Artist] Discography folders to restore and they restored fine. This means all i need to do is just redownload chris brown stuff, and i have my music collection backup.

 

it was one small 1kb file from Demonoid that stopped me from restoring the backup..