Cant find windows.old after rollingback to Windows 7

[Dante003]

I was using Windows 8 Pro, but because of some driver problems, I decided to rollback to Windows 7. I installed it at the same partition, without formating, but for some reason, the windows.old directory wasn't created. I stated that first because the hdd should be almost full, and second because there's no windows.old directory.
I ran Recuva for some minutes, and it did found some files that where on the last installation, with many of them not overwritten.
I would like to restore some of the files without using Recuva, as that will give me much work. There's any way to make windows.old show up?

 

[Brink]

Hello Dante, and welcome to Seven Forums.

The Windows.old folder is only given when you upgrade or do a repair install of the currently installed OS.

Going from Windows 8 Pro to Windows 7 is a downgrade, so Windows 8 would have been formatted for a clean install of Windows 7 instead, and not given a Windows.old folder.

Recuva was only able to find what hasn't been overwritten yet after the clean install.

I'm afraid that unless you had backed up your files prior to doing this, you are out of luck.

 

[gregrocker]

Windows.old is never a backup solution. Files should always be backed up externally.

One excellent way to do this is to Sync User Folders to Your SkyDrive Account | PCWorld which offers 7gb free storage (and additional dirt cheap) with each Windows Live ID.

 

[Dante003]

That's what I thought, I executed Recuva for a complete scan, but I the files that I wanted was completed overwritten, but I actually only wanted to recover some files that I downloaded, my important files is always on dropbox =] . I already downloaded those files.

Thanks for the help.