Recover Files from Windows 10: with or without Backups

People lose data at some point in their lives. The amount of data stored on personal hard drives and corporate servers continues to grow. And so is the risk of data loss. But not everyone is very conscious of the importance of keeping a regular backup of important files. An unexpected hardware failure, a virus attack, or even an inadvertent click could send your most valuable files to oblivion.

To create backups is not difficult or confusing as one may assume. In fact, Windows offers various backup tools to counter the data-loss risk. We have covered a few of them in previous articles. These tools include File History, OneDrive, Recover Drive and System Image. System Image is the tool to go to if you want to back up your whole system and personal files at a particular state. It is always good to know that you have a reliable duplicate safely stored away when your Windows system is in dire situations. 

How to Restore System Image Backups

Depending on whether or not you can boot into your Window 10, there are different ways to restore system image backups.

1. If you can still boot into Windows 10, navigate to Start > Settings > Update & security. Select Recovery in the left pane and then select Restart now.

2. If your system won't start, you will need a Recovery Drive or System repair disc to help you boot into the recovery menu. If you use a system repair disc, insert it into the optical drive and boot. If you use a Recovery Drive, insert it into the USB port and boot. (How to create Recovery Drive in Windows 10)

If your computer keeps skipping these bootable media and still tries to load the corrupted system, press F2 (may vary in different machines) to adjust the boot order.

Either way, once you are in the boot option menu, click Troubleshoot > System Image Recovery. Make sure your external hard disk where the system image is located is connected and turned on. System Image will select the latest system image, if you would rather restore another image, select the Select a system image and click Next and follow the instructions to proceed with the rest of the process.

How to Restore Files without Backups

Because not everyone has a copy of every file sitting around, what if we have no backups to fall back on? Can we still recover data? As long as the data loss is not caused by severe physical damage, we can mostly recover data with professional data recovery software.

H Data Recovery software is one of the best recovery software out there. It features 6 main data scan modules, each of which design to tackle different data loss situations such as deletion, formatting, crashed partitions, emptied recycle bin and USB flash drive problems. Restore your personal data after system reset, system crash or hard drive formatting, even you don't have any backups is no longer a mission impossible! H Data Recovery Software implements unique algorithms to deep scan and reconstitute missing data and restore them to your local drives with efficiency and clarity.