Restoring Windows from files

Solution 1:

After doing a clean install of Windows though I have no clue how to restore from those files.

Performing the clean install of Windows was the harder part of the job. Restoring your files is simply a matter of copying the files back to where they came from originally.

I was able to copy all my files both as a full copy and paste onto another drive, as well as a clonezilla image.

A simple copy and paste on to a separate backup hard drive is the backup method I use.

To restore your files, just copy your Documents folder contents on your backup drive to your Windows Documents folder, copy the contents of your Music folder in your backup drive to your Windows Music folder and so on.

I am pretty sure that would leave me with a mess of improperly installed programs and/or whatever corruption caused my problems in the first place.

The backups that mean anything are of the files you created. Files created through installation should be recreated through their relevant install programs.

Games, apps and programs need proper installation for them to work properly. Just put the install disk in and run it, or if the setup files were downloaded, re-download them and run them.

For example, if you are talking about Adobe Acrobat Reader for reading PDF files, go to https://www.adobe.com/download and you can download and install it free from there.