Restoring Old Files With System Restore?

I recently lost some files, so I did a system restore to a date that the files were intact to retrieve them. However, while the programs on the computer are now correctly set back to the system restore date, the files in question are still missing (at least partially). I'm curious is there exists a way to restore not the applications and system settings, but simply to restore old files, or if it's too late at this point. I suspect if I went to a professional they would be able to work some magic to restore the actual files, but it wouldn't be a standard procedure, and I don't have the funds right now to do so.

In more detail: I had XAMPP installed so I could do local testing before putting websites I was working on online. As such, the folder in which I kept all my local data for web development work was within XAMPP's 'htdocs' folder, which is where the local files needed to be stored so that apache and php could utilize them. However, since the install of XAMPP, i'd been having issues getting Apache to run - it worked occasionally, but would usually quit after a second of running each time I started it (that's a whole other issue though). In any case, because I couldn't figure out why Apache wasn't working in my XAMPP install, I decided, 'screw it, I'll give WampServer a try instead, and proceeded to uninstall XAMPP then restart the computer to get a clean slate before installing WAMP. Of course, I foolishly spaced the fact that all my local web development files were stored in the XAMPP files, and they were all deleted during the uninstall. So I proceeded to do a system restore to about 24 hours ago (the most recent system restore point). It seemed fine at first, until I tried to get my old web dev files back: I went to the htdocs folder in my now-restored XAMPP folder, but the old files were not intact! It seems that while XAMPP is back on my computer, all the files that were deleted during the initial uninstall were not restored. Specifically, and I can't for the life of me figure out why this would be, but the only parts that remained were the file structure (all the old folders where there, but not many of the files within them), Javascript files, and favicon image files. Everything else is still missing.

is there a way, within windows, to actually restore all those old files? Or due to the sequence in which the uninstall of XAMPP then the restore went, is it too late?