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Problem restoring user data only on new machine

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Hi there,

according to my backup strategy, I only want to restore the "Users" folder on a fresh Windows so that all the data for my programs is immediately available. This saves space and time for the backups and with the new Windows package manager, lists of programs will soon be easy to install on the system.

I am currently trying to practice an appropriate restore on a VirtualBox machine and here is where I run into the following problems:

The restore hangs at (less than a minute) and after rebooting the system, the files seem to be there but the system is no longer usable at that point. Programs don't open, the Windows menu doesn't open, etc.

The backups are always all validated.
Is there anything else I am doing wrong? Is the concept fundamentally stupid perhaps?

Many greetings
Daniel

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Daniel,

My advice is to be patient.  The process may look as though it is hung but in reality it is not.  I have had to wait what seems like several minutes sometimes at the end of a restore process for the app to finish up the process.

 

Enchantech wrote:

Daniel,

My advice is to be patient.  The process may look as though it is hung but in reality it is not.  I have had to wait what seems like several minutes sometimes at the end of a restore process for the app to finish up the process.

Are there any guidelines on how long I should wait? Because I've been waiting for several hours to complete the recovery and it was still "less than a minute".
 

Steve Smith wrote:

That is good to know, thanks.
But I only want to transfer the application data and I would reinstall the applications themselves.

One issue of backing up / restoring the Users folders is that these contain hidden / system level profile files which are interdependent on the associated registry files.

You could try selecting only specific application folders below the users level and restoring just these which should be both much quicker and also safer.

I found out that all the NTUSER files are such files. Which files also belong to this category?

If I just exclude these from the recovery, then it should work, right?

 

I've got a solution for this.
 

You must restore the profile in the user folder, but you must not overwrite the current profile or user folder of the current user.

In order to restore the usability of the profile, you now have to resort to another tool. I used a free tool called "TransferWiz" for this.

With this tool you have to create a transfer file from your restored profile and then you can use the transfer file to override or create a user on the same machine.

After that I could install my Browser and all my bookmarks and plugins were already installed.
Same for Thunderbird. I installed it and every single configured E-Mail address was there.

I've tested only these two programs, but I guess that most applications will pick up the data and work perfectly fine.