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OS change from W7 to W10

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I'm planning to upgrade to W10 from W7 and was wondering if I can just restore my backup directly to a fresh new copy of W10 installed on my PC?

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Albert, welcome to these public User Forums.

What type of backup are you meaning for this question?

If you have a Disk backup of your Windows 7 OS then restoring that to your Windows 10 system would undo all the work of upgrading to Win 10 by downgrading you back to Win 7 again.

If you have a Files & Folders backup from Windows 7, then it depends on what files & folders you have backed up and where you are wanting to restore them to?

You should not attempt to restore an system files or folders from Windows 7 to a Windows 10 system as you will risk breaking the OS and having an unbootable system.

I plan to to restore from my files and folders backup.  The only system related folder I plan to move is my "Appdata" folder.

 

 

Albert, I would still advocate being very careful when moving any system folder, including Appdata - please make a backup of the current folder before copying or recovering older data from your backup to it.  I would recommend being very selective in what you recover or copy to the Appdata folder, i.e. pick one application at a time and check that all is still ok after copying data.

Albert, are you planning to do an upgrade to Windows 10 or are you planning to do a complete from scratch installation. If you're doing an upgrade while keeping all your installed apps then there may be very little to nothing that should be restored to AppData from the Windows 7 backup.

If you are doing a complete installation, then you will need to be reinstalling your applications first. The, as Steve says, you should be very selective about restoring anything to AppData. You would need to be aware of what specific data may be needed. It probably won't be so easy as simply restoring a whole folder.

As Bruno said, if you you upgrade in place you should not need to touch AppData.  If you are going to do a clean installation then you are going to need to reinstall your applications and they will build their own AppData.  Then you might want to overlay some of the new AppData sub-directories with saved copies from the old system ... but only ones that you know will work correctly.

That is a good way to get your old browser and email client profiles back.  It's a good way for propagating forward customization for some applications.  But it's also a way to break applications that need current implementation data in AppData.  Be careful.

As a general rule, I try to keep as all of my major data out of the AppData folder.

I have a ProgramData folder on each drive. ProgramData (and AppData) on the system drive is generally for data that the apps keep track of, but not things that I need be aware of.

My data drives (one SSD, one HDD) contain ProgramData folders for my personal data  (e.g. Thunderbird and Firefox profiles) ... things that are not recreatable.

Many applications allow for changing folder locations but for some that don't I've used juctions (MKLINK /J ...).

All these locations get backed up on my daily data backup.