New user question: Windows 10 user profile backup with Total Commander

[grant_botes]

Over the weekend, some glitch or software corrupted my Windows 10 user profile, and I had quite a difficult time restoring files and rebuilding the profile. Luckily, I came across Total Commander and the synchronise directories command helped me a lot with some of what I had to do.

Now I am looking for a way to safeguard myself against anything similar happening again, and that leads me to ask: is anybody using Total Commander to make backups of their Windows 10 user profile, and if so, what strategies or methods are being used?

I have made a backup of my user profile using the built-in Windows backup tool but I was thinking that it might be good to have an easily browsable backup of my user profile folder, too. In case I just need to restore a few damaged or missing files and not a whole profile.

Any suggestions, thoughts or tips would be very much appreciated.

[Stefan2]

Hi and welcome to the community, grant_botes.

Do you have any experiences with scripting languages of your OS (MS-DOS Batch / PowerShell)?
And with sync tools like RoboCopy and such?





 

[gdpr deleted 6]

Well, i use Macrium Reflect for all my backup needs. While a free version is available, the free version unfortunately does not include the file backup feature found in the commercial editions.

If you find Windows' built-in backup capabilities unsatisfactory and you don't want to shell out for a professional software solution, cooking backup/restore scripts utilizing robocopy is your next best bet. robocopy is part of Windows, and a long established and well-known tool. Especially if you intend to make backups regularly with a baseline level of confidence, trying to make backups manually with TC's synchronize directories feature is laborious and (due to the manual nature) error-prone. As much as i adore TC, i wouldn't use TC for making regular backups of value.

Don't just have one single Total Commander-shaped hammer in your toolbox -- not every problem is suitable to be squashed with a hammer. On the other hand, every thing can be subjected to widlarizing, so, um... keep hammering on

[Dalai]

IMO the most important thing in a user profile is the ntuser.dat, the user's registry. This cannot be accessed while it's loaded by the system. I suggest to use a dedicated backup or imaging software to create images of your system partition. This way, if anything goes wrong, the system can be restored to the original state in a matter of minutes.

This is especially true for other cases no-one has any influence on, like a sudden death of the system drive. A file-based backup would be quite useless in such a case.

If you're talking about your documents and so on, that's another story. In that case, I suggest to change the path to the folders "My Documents", "Downloads" and so on, keeping the files on a separate partition. This makes data file backups a lot easier.

Regards
Dalai

[grant_botes]

Yes, I am familiar with RoboCopy and MS-DOS batch files.

Do you have any experiences with scripting languages of your OS (MS-DOS Batch / PowerShell)?
And with sync tools like RoboCopy and such?

[grant_botes]

Yes, you are are right, based on my experience this weekend. I have created a second administrator login for myself and was thinking of using RoboCopy or Total Commander to make a copy of my main user profile from there. I stumbled across this article today (https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/windows-user-backup-guide.html), and that is making think either RoboCopy or Total Commander synchronise might work if I use a second administrator login. From the article I learned that I need to backup my user profile and ProgramData folder.

IMO the most important thing in a user profile is the ntuser.dat, the user's registry. This cannot be accessed while it's loaded by the system. I suggest to use a dedicated backup or imaging software to create images of your system partition. This way, if anything goes wrong, the system can be restored to the original state in a matter of minutes.

This is especially true for other cases no-one has any influence on, like a sudden death of the system drive. A file-based backup would be quite useless in such a case.

If you're talking about your documents and so on, that's another story. In that case, I suggest to change the path to the folders "My Documents", "Downloads" and so on, keeping the files on a separate partition. This makes data file backups a lot easier.

Regards
Dalai

[grant_botes]

Thank you for your good advice. I appreciate it.

Well, i use Macrium Reflect for all my backup needs. While a free version is available, the free version unfortunately does not include the file backup feature found in the commercial editions.

If you find Windows' built-in backup capabilities unsatisfactory and you don't want to shell out for a professional software solution, cooking backup/restore scripts utilizing robocopy is your next best bet. robocopy is part of Windows, and a long established and well-known tool. Especially if you intend to make backups regularly with a baseline level of confidence, trying to make backups manually with TC's synchronize directories feature is laborious and (due to the manual nature) error-prone. As much as i adore TC, i wouldn't use TC for making regular backups of value.

Don't just have one single Total Commander-shaped hammer in your toolbox -- not every problem is suitable to be squashed with a hammer. On the other hand, every thing can be subjected to widlarizing, so, um... keep hammering on