Windows 7 Backup and Restore

[dan2014]

Hi
I am new to this forum but have encountered a very irritating problem.
A couple of weeks ago my laptop crashed and upon looking at it the hard drive had gone.
I have backed it up using backup and restore several times to my external drive and thought this would be ok when a new hard drive was installed.
I installed the new hard drive and used a windows boot drive to boot the machine.
I chose the restore option on the Windows screen and connected the external hard drive. It restored the laptop to the date of my last backup with no problem, I did think though it had done it pretty quick.
When sifting through my Itunes where I have several Gb of music I found that it had not copied any music files or photos across.
So, I looked on the external hard drive and none of those files are on there.
Can someone help as this is the most irritating thing ever. I though backup and restore was supposed to backup all files.

Thanks

 

[Trouble]

Hello Dan and welcome to the forums.
I've never actually used the native file backup utility within Windows 7 and prefer instead using third party programs like Acronis True Image (commercial paid for) or AOEMI Backupper (free for personal use).
Many people have reported less than optimal results when using the native utility.

Having said that, have you considered that in your particular case that, this might apply...

If you're restoring files from a backup that was made on another computer, the files will be restored in a folder under the user name that was used to create the backup. If the user names are different, you'll need to navigate to the folder where the files are restored. For example, if your user name was Molly on the computer that the backup was made on but your user name is MollyC on the computer that the backup is being restored on, the restored files will be saved in a folder labelled Molly.

SOURCE: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/restore-files-backup#1TC=windows-7

Maybe on the off chance that something like that might have happened it might be worth a look see.
Just a guess and as a follow up you might consider, if you've restored from a "System Image" that might only be a point in time and you may have some additional files and folders in subsequent incremental backups that have not been restore yet as mentioned further down in the same article I linked to.

Good luck and keep us posted.