How to Restore Windows 7 Backups on Windows 8.1 or 10

Locate Backup:

First you need to connect the drive containing your Windows 7 backups to your PC running on Windows 8.1 or 10. In the drive locate the file with name of PC backups are from alongside “MediaID.bin” file. Double click on the file folder with the name of your Windows 7 PC to open it.

Inside the folder you will see few other folders named "Backup Set YEAR-MM-DD ######". And each "Backup Set" folder is a separate backup. Here locate any backup file with the date and time which you want to restore your files from. If you just like to restore the last backup, then select the most recent folder.

Also you’ll find one or more folders named “Backup Files YEAR-MM-DD ######” alongside a “Catalogs” folder. Each “Backup Files” folder is an incremental backup of the same overall backup, so choose the most recent backup file.

Extract the Backups:

Inside each and every "Backup Files" folder, you will find multiple “Backup files#.zip” which is the archives of your backup files. Open every zip file one by one and examine the file to see whether it contains the file you required and extract it. There is no better way of telling which zip file contains the file which you required and you probably want more than one file.

To extract the zip file, we recommend using a file-extraction program like 7-Zip. Once you’ve installed it, you can select all the .zip files, right-click them, and select 7-Zip > Extract files. 7-Zip will extract all the files from the archives you selected, getting all the files backed up when you performed that backup.

Extract them to a specific folder, such as a folder named “Windows 7 Backups” on your desktop. Repeat this process for each individual Backup Files folder. Remember that each Backup Files folder is an incremental backup. So, when you extract the .zip files from the first folder, you’re getting all the files that existed when you first backed up, at the state they were in that backup. When you extract the files from the second backup file folder, you’re getting all the new or changed files.

Consider extracting each set of incremental backups to the same folder, from oldest to newest, overwriting any duplicate files. As long as you do this in the correct order, you should end up with a single folder structure containing only the most recent versions of your files.

Dig Through Your Backups:

Even after extracting the file, you still need to dig through the backups, deleting the files that are unnecessary because deleted files will be present still and you can extract the important files from the backups. For this, you need to navigate to the folder where you have extracted the backups.

The folder structure of your backup will be obvious, so there will be a C folder that represents your C drive, User folder representing Users and folders of every account on your PC. If you have backed up from the other folders on Windows PC, you will see the folders representing them as well.