Many Files & Folders Not copied When Copying User Profile

Quadzilla · 06 Jan 2014

Hello everyone,
I'm trying to copy the user profiles from a few different Windows 7 PCs onto a 500 GB Western Digital Passport portable hard drive. I'm doing this for a friend who's getting rid of a few PCs as she may get a new one and/or a Apple laptop. I'm familiar with Windows transfer but didn't feel safe using that as I'm not sure what OS she'll be using later on. For the first machine (a Dell laptop w/Vista), I copied the user profile folder from the laptop to the portable drive. All the files were copied, except for the ntuser files and one other that couldn't be copied. When I tried to copy the user profile on her desktop to the portable drive, I first confirmed via properties there were 48,159 files at 65 GB. Problem is, when I pasted the files into the portable drive folder the copy window that popped up said only 1911 files at 1.22 GB were being copied. All user profiles were copied but many of the files within the profiles were missing such as my documents, my pictures, my videos etc. In the main profile, only eight items out of 24 were copied. I did do a small test and successfully copied the My Pictures folder from the desktop to the portable hard drive.

Any idea what could be causing this? I tried using both the copy command as well as drag-and-drop all with the same results. The portable hard drive is new and I was able to successfully copy a user profile from her laptop to the portable hard drive.

Thanks in advance for any info you can provide.

MilesAhead · 06 Jan 2014

I'm not sure what's up but I would try something like RichCopy. I successfully used it to copy Windows.old(over 250,000 file objects) over a network to a USB drive. If I tried to do that with Explorer it would have spent three days calculating how many files it was going to copy before it started to copy any.

Free Utility: RichCopy, an Advanced Alternative to RoboCopy

Microsoft Richcopy

Quadzilla · 09 Jan 2014

Thank you sir, that worked great. Cool ID BTW, I'm a fan.

MilesAhead · 09 Jan 2014

Quadzilla said:

Thank you sir, that worked great. Cool ID BTW, I'm a fan.

You are quite welcome. Glad it worked for you. :)

Since problem solved I can take a minute to relate one of my favorite Miles stories. The story goes Miles is invited to dinner at the White House(I forget which President it was.) So he's hanging out and there's this older society lady who doesn't have a clue who he is. She asks him "So what did you do to get invited to the White House?" Miles thinks for a second and says, "I changed Music 5 or 6 times."