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SOLVED: Restore points, Firefox history and extensions all lost

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Tone111:
Hi all,
After doing a defrag and cleanup in safe mode and going back into normal on my W7 SP1 x64 desktop I found my Firefox had "refreshed" itself to a cleanly installed version, with no bookmarks, history (which I normally never delete), and none of the several extensions I'd installed - one of which was Session Manager which I now can't use to restore my previous tabs, along with no history. Also any of the commonly used url's I type in which used to pop up now don't show as recognised and have to be typed in in full.

I haven't cleaned anything up to cause this (that I know of), and unfortunately I don't appear to have any restore points present now either so I can't revert that way, and there were at least a couple last time I looked  :confused: I don't know if these issues are related but I suspect they might be  :undecided: - I have tried to create a restore point to see if it's working, and even though it's turned on it failed to create one - does anyone have any ideas on either restoring my browser features etc or the restore point issue??
Thanks

Boggin:
While it's known that a 3rd party defrag program can wipe out any created restore points, I've never heard of one preventing new ones from being created - or affecting a browser.

What did you use to defrag ?

Check Event Viewer for any related VSS errors as well as checking to see that Volume Shadow Copy can be started in services.msc by clicking on it then on Start in the upper left pane.

Run a command prompt as an admin and see what a sfc /scannow has to report.

If it reports it is unable to repair some files then download and run SFCFix.exe which will give a more concise report and may even fix the files that sfc was unable to.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/sfcfix.html

Tone111:
Thanks for the reply Boggin.

Well I went a bit mad and used several defraggers to compare as my system was grinding a bit, and they all seem to show different levels of defragmentation, and some show % to defrag even after being defragged by others, so I'm not sure which is the best or most accurate way to optimally defrag a HD and haven't had chance to look into it yet. :rolleyes:

The ones I remember using were Sysinternals Power Defragmanter, IOBit Smart Defrag, Glary Utilities defrag and Wise 365 defrag. I may have used a couple of others, Auslogics, WinUtilities and another, just to check levels rather than actually defragging. I did it all in safe mode with no network to speed things up as there's much less running and placing demand on the CPU, would that have made a difference?

I wasn't aware that defragging could remove restore points or I might have been more careful, but the levels were significant and the disk did seem like it needed it and is running a bit smoother now, so is there any way of protecting against this? Would a reg backup do the trick in the absence of a restore point? I do have several of these but aren't sure what this will affect...

Is the browser issue related then, and is there any way to find or restore my bookmarks, history, session, extensions, tabs, url's etc? I've never used the sync option or set up an account, so everything will be under the Default profile I'm guessing, I'm hoping it's recoverable...  :undecided: :wink:

I'm at work all day so won't get chance to check the VSS or do an SFC/ FCFix until this evening so will update after that...

Boggin:
I only ever use Windows own defrag and that of a couple I've tried is the only one to achieve 0% fragmentation.

Not sure what the registry backups will give you back, but you could give them a try.

Tone111:
Ok, I don't tend to use Windows defrag utility, as good as it is, as it takes seemingly forever to run!  :sleep: Hence the use of various 3rd party defraggers. Looking into it though it does seem as though losing restore points is a fairly common occurrence after defragging, even with the Windows one  :omg: and I have lost loads along the way, just never realised in my ignorance that it was tied to defragging the HD.

Anyways I'll try the other stuff later on this eve...

Don't know if there's a glitch with the site Boggin but I received 3 email notifications within 1 minute after your last reply!  :shocked: :cheesy:

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