What would you do?

In2Deep

In2Deep

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I recently had a massive hard drive failure resulting in having to do a clean install of windows. This initially did not concern me too much as I regularly backed up my C:drive with Acronis True Image. After using the rescue disk to restart my PC I used Acronis to recover my C:drive. Unfortunately, although Acronis restored all my directories, ALL the file extensions were corrupted (as shown in the picture below). My only option was to reinstall all my programs from scratch, this meant all my custom settings to many programs were lost.
I am now reassessing how I back up my C: Drive. My initial thought was to buy and identical SSD and do a clone whenever I installed a new program.
How do others back up their system so that they can recover from such an event as this?

Screenshot showing corrupted files.

Screen Shot 2026-08-21 at 11.26.33.456 AM.png
 
It's probably too late now but you could just have deleted the additional characters on the end of the extensions and it's quite likely that all would have been well.

As to backups, for them to be useful they need to be automatic because Sod's Law guarantees that, the one time you forget to do it, the system will fail and take out something vital. Moreover, to be safe, you need to alternate between two backups every day. There's a useful set of reviews here...

uk.pcmag.com

The Best Backup Software and Services for 2026

These top-rated backup services make it easy to create online and local copies of important files so you can retrieve them if disaster strikes.
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AndrewFlannigan said:
It's probably too late now but you could just have deleted the additional characters on the end of the extensions and it's quite likely that all would have been well.
Click to expand...
There were literally 100's of thousands of files affected and I could not find a program that automatically removed extra characters from extensions. Plenty of bulk rename utilities, but not for extensions unfortunately.
 
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