It is now around 5PM, EST. Yesterday at 5 PM, I plugged in a standalone hard disk and typed
copy /s * d:
which means copy everything to drive d: (the hard disk), including subdirectories. It continued till 10:30 when I went to bed leaving it running. It would have stopped five hours later when the machine went to sleep, so that means 10 1/2 hours from when I started. I woke the computer up at 9 this morning and it has continued copying for the last 8 hours. So that is 18 1/2 hours and it still isn’t finished. All of the last 8 hours have been in subdirectories windows/servicing. I have no idea when it will all end. Maybe I will go to bed tonight while it is still copying.
This is all pointless since things in windows directory cannot be installed just by copying the files. Next time I do this, I will stick to the directories that have stuff I have created or modified.
I’m Mac-centric and therefore my savvy about PC util apps is somewhat limited, but I had quite good luck with a product called Macrium Reflect, using it on virtual machines and on my partner’s dying PC to move her to other newer hardware.
It can even make a bootable backup or transport your entire C drive environment to run on utterly different hardware. (I’ve done it successfully).
ETA if you want a bootable clone of your disk you probably need to use a utility like @AHunter3 suggests rather than simply copy over a bunch of folders.
Yeah, copying files like that through USB (my assumption) is not very efficient. There are lots of options for free utilities that will create an actual (restorable) back-up and run much faster. Most of them compress the data prior to writing to the external drive, which saves a heck of a lot of time.
It is now past 7:30 two days later and the copying is still going on. There were a couple of 5 hour periods when the computer went to sleep, but it is still somewhere near 45 hours and still going strong. Way more than half of it is in the Windows directory. It is now on
\Windows\WinSxS\Temp\InFlight and has been there for several hours. I won’t back up that way. I don’t think there is a way to say copy everything but \Windows.
Sure there is. Copying all the files except your OS directory and swapfile is pretty easy. You probably want to start your computer in Safe Mode with Networking. I keep a copy of all my non-OS files that is updated each night using SyncToy. (It’s not supported any longer, but it is readily available, free, and works just fine. It only copies and replace files that have changed since you last ran it. I run it off of Windows Task Scheduler.)
Final report. It was still going at 10 last night. When I looked at my computer this morning it had been rebooted. This means that MS installed an update during the night. This was at 6:30 and the computer was not asleep, meaning the reboot was later than 1:30. Looking at the file times, it looks like the copying ended at 1:14, that being the creation time of d:\windows. So it was a near thing. I think the copying must have taken about 45 hours. I’ll not repeat that.
Another product you could consider is Retrospect, originally by Dantz, got purchased by EMI (I think?) and then got spun off as its own company. I’ve mostly used the Mac version of it but in the early 2000s I used the Windows verson to make a bootable clone of the C drive of a Windows NT computer, swapped the drives, and installed Windows Server 2000 over one of them while preserving NT on the other.
They’re commercialware and more geared towards industry and corporate IT departments but last I dealt with them, they still had “one workstation, one user” affordable license plans.
I feel your pain. I am backing up about 430 GB to Dropbox, with about 24 Mbps upload speed. It’s been updating for about 36 hours now and almost 70% complete. But it’s a one time thing. Wishing I had symmetric download/upload speeds.