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Restoring from backup without os?

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Hello, im having trouble figuring out how to create a full back up of all my files (everything on my hard drive) without copying the operating system. I just naively created an entire backup of the pc and deleted my windows 10 enterprise. I then install windows 10 pro successfully and went to recover pc from the saved back up. When it was done, the windows 10 pro os was gone and the enterprise was back!

how do i make sure this doesn't happen? do I have to selectively choose what to back up by dragging and droppping? Can i turn off an option to backup the entire pc except for the os? please help me out here.

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Hi Patz,

You want to setup a file backup instead of disks/paritions.  Then just backup the specific folders where your data resides (user profile usually).  When you want to restore, you can just pick certain files or folders or the entire user profile.  However please be aware that overwriting an entire user profile may not be the best idea either as Windows identifies each one in the registry uniquely.

An entire disk backup is just that.  It is an exact snapshot of your hard drive at that point in time.  If you restore an entire disk backup, it wipes out what is on the disk and replaces it exactly as the snapshot was taken at the point in time it was created.  

Once you have Windows 10 Pro installed, a full disk backup won't be bad anymore as it will revert back to the backups taken while Windows 10 Pro was installed.  In your case, it just sounsd like you reverted to a backup of when Windows 10 Enterprise had been installed.

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