How to save and restore files after a certain date

I may have been infected. To be safe, I'm going to restore known good backups of my C and D drives that were made on 2/1/23.

1. Before I do the restore, I want to save files on my D (data) drive that were modified after 2/1/23 to date.
2. Then do the restore of my C and D drives.
3. Then virus scan the files that were saved in step-1.
4. Then restore those files back into their proper folders on the D drive.

Any recommendations on how I can save the the files in step-1 and then restore the files back into their proper folders in step-4?

(Running windows 10)

In this guide, i will show you how to use Windows File Recovery in Windows 10 and Windows 11 to restore accidentally deleted files.

FreeBooter said:

In this guide, i will show you how to use Windows File Recovery in Windows 10 and Windows 11 to restore accidentally deleted files.

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Thanks. More complicated than I'm looking for. But thanks again.

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dalchina said:

Just a couple of thoughts in passing:
My guess is you'd need a specific script or tool. I doubt that Xcopy or Teracopy, for example, are any use here.

Assuming you want to create a folder structure the same as your source disk, but containing only files modified after your specific date, have a look at:
Copy files based on the date accessed, modified or created in Windows using Copywhiz

I've never used it, and don't know from that if it would do exactly that - in particular if it would regenerate the folder structure, so you would need to read further and try it.

There is a free trial- again you'd need to check the limitations.

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File explorer (search) can be used to find files modified after a date e.g.
datemodified:28/3/23..2/4/23

- but this wouldn't help you with copying and retaining the folder structure.

Thanks for the suggestion.

As a test, I used Win10's File Explorer search and got a list of folders and files that were modified after 2/1/23. There are a lot of files that I have no interest in saving. In fact, I was wondering if one of those files might be one that was modified by an infection, and one that an antivirus scan does not find.

Because of that, I've decided to do the recovery process manually as follows:

1. Use Win10's file explorer search to save all of the files that were modified after 2/1/23, in a folder.
2. Run an antivirus custom scan on that folder to see what happens.
3. Then delete files that do not contain my personal data that I want to save.
..... This should leave me with only files I want to save.
4. Then I will have to manually decide which files go in which folder.
..... This will be a tedious task but not too bad since there will only be my data that was modified after 2/1/23.

I think that this, though time consuming, will be the safest way to recover "my data" modified after 2/1/23. Any automated way that I was hoping to do might be too risky.

Thanks.

dalchina said:

An option you could consider is somewhat the reverse... but saves the structure, making copying back easier.

a. Make a full copy of everything on D: (say) exactly as is.
b. Search for files modified BEFORE the date- and delete those.

What you will be left with is all the files after the date you want- in the original folder structure.

You then check all of those.

For C: it's a different matter- you only want to deal with your personal data files- not O/S files.

That is a very innovative method of accomplishing the task. It would involve a "huge" amount of files for everything before 2/1/23 though. But thanks for thinking outside of the box.