Backup complete HDD with Synctoy? Errors

Hello community,
I bought a new external HDD and decided to backup my HDD with Synctoy. It just finished and it had to copy about 300GB but it only did copy 290GB and got over 1000 errors. Are this things to worry about or is it normal? Because as long as it copys important files like documents and programs (which it also did) it's okay for me. But I wonder when I would do now a fresh reinstall of my system and copy everything which is on the backup back to the main hdd (also overwriting files) would I also have the registry and such back? Where is the registry located anyway? In which folder is it? I know that you can go into regedit and then export the registry but where is it located on the HDD? Because I was wondering if Synctoy copies it too or if it's blocked or something.

I found now out that some of the files which it didn't copy are in folders where some pop up comes when you try to enter them, saying that you need administration rights and when you click on "continue" then you can enter the folder. Is there any way to give the program rights so it can access every file? I tried running as administrator but it didn't work.

Frozenthunder said:

Hello community,
I bought a new external HDD and decided to backup my HDD with Synctoy. It just finished and it had to copy about 300GB but it only did copy 290GB and got over 1000 errors. Are this things to worry about or is it normal? worry about it. You should be using something that will retry every file tille it gets it correct. You never know when it will skip a file with a serial number and then you are hosed

Because as long as it copys important files like documents and programs (which it also did) it's okay for me.

But I wonder when I would do now a fresh reinstall of my system and copy everything which is on the backup back to the main hdd (also overwriting files) would I also have the registry and such back? No you cant "copy" and "paste" a backup and restore for a lot of reasons including there is no redundancy, nor indication of how much space it needs nor location.

Where is the registry located anyway? In which folder is it? I know that you can go into regedit and then export the registry but where is it located on the HDD? Because I was wondering if Synctoy copies it too.

Click to expand...

There are many good back up and imaging apps on the market. Even the one built into win 7 is better than sync toys.

Personally I prefer Acronis True Image home for a multitude of reasons.

Let's call your personal files P and call Windows W.

Synctoy is a file by file back tool used primarily to back up P rather than W. I've never used it, but applications of that type are not likely to back up all W files even if you attempt it. They may not even back up absolutely all of your P files--for instance if some P files are open or have an extremely long path.

You can normally investigate the log file generated by a backup program to get an idea of what it did not back up and you may even learn why.

Synctoy is not a good candidate to back up the registry or your INSTALLED programs. I wouldn't expect it to back up the registry at all.


Backing up W (including installed programs) is best done with an imaging application such as the one built into Windows or Acronis or Macrium Reflect.

If you make an image of C and then restore C, the registry of the restored C will be identical to the state of registry at the time you made the image. You can't restore just parts of an image, but some imaging applications will let you root around in them to recover individual files--without restoring the image.

P would normally include all of your documents, pictures, email, music, video, browser bookmarks, and the uninstalled versions of downloaded programs (anything you don't have on an installation disc).

You need to discover in what folder each of those things lives on your hard drive and then direct Synctoy to those files/folders--rather than to Windows files.

It can be advantageous to keep your P files on a separate partition for organizational purposes. If you instead keep everything (P and W) on the C partition, then any image you make will include both P and W. You will likely find that keeping P file backups in an image can lead to problems---the image may fail or you may not be able to easily access your P files within the image.

Thanks for the help
I also had Acronis but I don't want to do a complete image all the time. Synctoy only copies modified files and thats what I like very much. When I use the built in backup function from Windows 7, does it make a complete Backup of everything and does it also just update the changes like synctoy does? Because when I select C: it doesn't show the Windows folder.