Solved copying contents of user directory

[mzimmers]

Hi, all -

I have a system with two drives, one with Windows 7 and the other with Linux. Recently, my Windows installation failed to boot. I was able to copy the contents of my user drive by mounting the Windows drive while booted in Linux.

I've since rebuilt the Windows drive, and am ready to copy back my user data. My question is, which files should I not copy? I'm guessing all those weird looking NTUSER files shouldn't be copied, but are there any others that I should avoid?

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Alejandro85]

I would take it the other way around. Let's find things that you may want to copy, then leave the rest behind.

The obvious things would be to copy your user data. That includes documents, music, pictures, videos, favorites and the desktop. Most of your personal files may be there, unless you explicitly put them somewhere else.
A few poorly designed programs like to store its settings under the documents folders, so you may want to exclude those.
The desktop typically contains shortcuts to some other places, you may want to review if those are still correct an fix those if you need those.

The AppData folder contains almost always settings for your programs. You may or may not want to take part of this folder with you, or simply choose to reconfigure your software if you want. You might consider copying part of this, but leaving it for simplicity is not a bad option too.

Other programs may drop a folder or file with settings or maybe data in the root of your profile. Depending on what's there there might be some valuable files there (for example, VirtualBox disk images are normally saved there) that you may want to copy.

I can't think of something else worth copying, so I would not bother copying anything else.

 

[mzimmers]

Thanks, Alejandro. That's some good information there.