OK, this may take some time and setup. I'm usually pretty good with this stuff but I've run into some road blocks, particularly with the Windows 7 Restore from Backup.
Here's the situation:
My old Dell Optiplex 960 quad desktop, with double .5 TB RAID drives, and an upgraded Corsair power supply, has crashed on me a couple of times, mostly unable to re-boot. The last time it took me 48 hours to get it running again.
My house is wired with Cat-5 and Cat-6, that I ran myself, first in 1999 and again in 2009. I have both wired and wireless connections, several switches and hubs, 2 additional routers set up as access points, and a range extender as well. There's a NAS drive, plus a router drive on a USB 3 port, which, unfortunately requires SMBv1 to access. In addition to PCs, laptops, phones, and iPads connected there's a couple of printers, and a specialized, super-secure Cisco router for my wife's work that only allows her company-issued notebook and company-issued printer to access it. I suspect it's a VPN link.
After the first crash and recovery, I ran a thorough backup. I couldn't for some reason, write it to the NAS, but I was able to write to the router's attached USB drive, a 4tb WD. There are clear files out there that actually have data. I can manually go into them and open them. But they are in over 600 backup directories, each of which mimics part of my desktop.
When it crashed the 2nd time, I had to reinstall Win 7, complete with close to 200 updates...and all the data on the RAID HDD was lost.
The RESTORE function refuses to recognize than any of the 600+ directories actually exist, not matter what I do. It sees the directories, but not the files within them. Most of the crucial data is either on the NAS or also on my Surface Go, but not everything.
Meanwhile since the Optiplex is from 2010, I decided it was time for a new desktop. My older son convinced me that building a new machine would be a better option than buying a pre-built. Let's just say that the build didn't go as well as expected--I haven't built a PC probably since 2002, at a guess. But right now it's running (mostly) smoothly. I'm hoping it will carry me for at least 5 more years:
Thor V2 Tower (comes with 4 fans and front-panel ports)
ASRock Motherboard with built-in WiFi and BlueTooth
AMD R 2700x processor
Noctua processor heat sink and fan
960gb SSD
2x2TB Hitachi 7200 drives in a RAID pair
16GB DDR4
Corsair 850 watt PS
dual Nvidia GTX 550 vid cards SLI connected. (Yes, they are older but I'm not a gamer--came out of an Alienware machine I replaced the MB in. That has a GTX 1060 instead which, I'm told, does more than the twin 550s).
The DVD/CD RW isn't quite running right, but that's only temporary. Alienware keyboard and mouse my son isn't using is the temp input.
It has a fresh install of Windows 10 and no problems at this time.
But, again, when I tried to restore from the Windows 7 backups on the Router hard drive, it couldn't find the folders. So I copied them to the local RAID drive...same result.
I'm now running limited S/W on the Optiplex: Ms Office 2016, Chrome, and IE for the moment. It can access the LAN via WiFi or RJ45 with no problem.
But how the FUCK do I extract the data from the 600+ backup folders without painstakingly go through them one by one?
Any (useful) suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Anyone here Expert on Windows 7 backups?
1"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."