Fwd: Windows 10 to 11 - backup - how much is enough>

[charles meyer]

My talented listmates,

I've been hearing the "upgrade from W10 to W11 isn't supposed to be bad

I'm super concerned now.

It's Monday afternoon 10-13-2025m and it's taken 3,5 hours already to backup my 12.5GB hard drive on my Dell laptop. It's been stuck on 99% for over an hour copying all sports of weird files like .mo, etc.

I haven't even gotten to the install W11 yet.

I don't know which files besides my text, graphics and videos files I need from W10 ??

I'f read that a few had to re-install W10 after the bad install of W11 so I thought I;d back uop my whole hard drive (C).

I backup by highlighting my C drive and press Ctrl + A then Ctrl C and then on the external hard drive I press Ctrl + v

I don't have any $$$$ backup software and will NEVER backup to the cloud.

Can I just cancel the backup at 99%?

It's been stuck at 99% for 1.75 hours.

Thank you,

Charles.

[Chris Meyer]

The backup getting stuck and taking many hours isn't super surprising.  Windows (I'd venture all operating systems) have trouble indexing and counting all of the small files and sometimes the really large ones so the estimated time to copy may be very inaccurate from its original projection.  At this point if it's not a huge inconvenience just let it copy until it finishes but it might take many more hours.

Generally speaking on Windows the most important folder is the Users directory, that's where your documents/videos/pictures *should* be stored but if your computer was set up by a company/school/organization that might be very incorrect.  The other folders that might have information are the ProgramData and AppData but those are likely hidden on the hard drive unless you have hidden folders turned on, but those would only really contain customizations to the software you've installed so it should be less important that you back them up.

If you have a Google Account you *could* upload your information to the cloud which would potentially offload responsibility of maintaining those files but you should probably keep a local copy(s) handy in case the mighty Google fails and loses your data.  Windows 11 will helpfully (sarcasm) try to get you on their cloud account to backup your files and if you click the wrong thing that's where all your data will end up so make sure you're reading carefully after your computer updates Microsoft is becoming much more obnoxious about trying to get you on their platform using an account and storing your data/e-mail/information.

Chris

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[charles meyer]

Hi Chris,

I generally copy my data (my version of a backup!) every 3-4 months so I don't lose any text, graphics. audio or video files.

That's all I do but at least I have my content.

What I'm trying to do BEFORE 10-15-2025  is ensure I have a backup copy of my Windows 10 on my ext hard drive as I stil need to check "Upgrade to W11."

I've read where 3 PCs upgraded perfectly but 2 others were a disaster with people.

In case of disaster they tell you make sure you have a backup copy of W10 to reinstall on that laptop and try installing W11 again.

Thank you Micro$$$ft for making this seamless!

Do you do a System Restore backup so it makes an exact cpu of your laptop C drive on your external hard drive  or a File History backup?

Until today, I had no idea there were 2 ways to backup your W10 laptop.

Thank you!

Charles.

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[Janet E. Lewis]

Hi Charles,

Chris is right about the backups.  However, how are you backing up?  Are you using windows backup or shareware?  I'm going to make some suggestions, but since I don't know how much you know about Windows, I'm going to assume a relatively low familiarity with Windows.  If this is stuff you already know, I apologize in advance!

You could try just waiting it out. I did a conversion of my email (I have a *lot* of email, mostly offline) from one client to another and, I kid you not, that took 5 days to complete.

However, if you don't want to wait it out or purchase backup software (which might not be any faster than what you're using now), you can do it manually. This will not make an image where you can recover your laptop in Windows 10 working condition, but these are the things that are most important to have backed up. The OS can always be reinstalled from scratch, but the files below are unique to your laptop and should be backup anyway in a form where you can go pull out the files you need if something happens.

I would recommend searching for File Explorer Settings, View tab, and select "Show hidden files, folders, or drives"  (it's where you can also uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types).  This makes it easier to see what you are really copying.

The key things you need to backup are the following:

C:\Users - if you copy all of it, then it will get AppData, which is where browsers store favorites/bookmarks and where your email desktop application (if you don't use a browser for this) stores its cache and settings.  Other software may have settings that you have customized for your own user account in there.

C:\ProgramData (this is for the global customizations that Chris mentioned)

Check to see if you or any program has created a directory in the root of C: and make a note of its name. This is less common now than it used to be, but some specialty, software for peripherals, gaming, and custom software still does this without asking you first.

Since this a Dell laptop, there are a couple of handy directories it's good to save if you need to rebuild it from scratch:

C:\dell  => This contains information about the setup script they used for your laptop and updates. 

C:\Drivers => This shows which drivers were available for your Dell as a Windows 10 machine.  You may want to download the Windows 11 drivers for your Dell and stash them on an external drive in case you need to install any of them manually.

A hidden file C:\dell.sdr  which has all the hardware info you need about your Dell.  It has part numbers and descriptions of everything that went into it.  It can be read by any text editor.  Real handy to have when you have to know *exactly* which part was used in your laptop.

Make sure you have the installers and their licenses printed out or saved to text for any and all software (including that for printers, scanners, and other peripherals) you've purchased on separate media (USB key, external drive, DVD, or even - gasp! - CD).  Updating from Windows 10 to Windows 11 reliably gets Microsoft applications and a few things like Adobe Acrobat, but for specialty software, games, software for peripherals, and any custom software, it's hit or miss.  Even though MS generally migrates its own applications pretty well, make sure you have any installation files/disks and license numbers for those as well! This is really important to save you grief later. I speak from painful personal experience, here.  :)

Make a backup copy of your Registry on general moral principle.  It will get rebuilt/modifed for Windows 11, but it's can be very handy to be able to gaze upon it to see if the reason something isn't working is a missing key or something.  If you find something like that, the best bet is to reinstall the application affected. Plus, you can always show your Registry to someone else who knows more about it than you do if you need advice or you find a suggestion on the web referencing a particular key.
You can make a backup of your Registry by searching for cmd.exe, and when you see cmd.exe listed in the results, right-click on it and choose "Run as administrator"
    Then in the Window that appears, run this command:
    regedit

Something like this will appear (the items might be expanded if you've used regedit before)

Go to File => Export...

Choose a good name for it, like RegistryWin10-20251013 or something and choose an external drive for it so you can consult it later.  It will add the .reg extension to it, which makes it possible to double-click it and modify your registry with it.  I always save it as a .txt file instead, so I can't accidentally do that.  If you ever did need to run it, you can always change the extension back to .reg.  

Under Export range, make sure you choose All
Click on Save.

Finally, to make your life (and the copy process) easier, try to get rid of unnecessary files:

Open the browsers that you use and clear their caches. This is where a lot of the itty bitty files that Chris mentioned are located. 
Delete everything in C:\Windows\Temp.  Programs are supposed to be polite and clear crap out of there when they exit, but not all of them are.  Just select them all and Delete.  A number of them will give the error that they can't be deleted.  That's fine, it means they're actually in use at the moment.  Just skip those.
Look in your Downloads folder and get rid of anything you don't need or move the files either somewhere in your Documents folder or onto an external drive.  A lot of files can pile up in there and take up lots of space.

Now is when you switch to being somebody else.  
Create a new local user and add it to the Administrators group.  Start => Settings => Accounts => Other users should get you to where you can do this.  I'm obliged to say that this should have a very good password, since it has admin powers. The reason you need a different account than your own is that this allows you to copy your C:\Users\charles profile without the problem of having any of the files therein in use and locked.

Log out as you and log on as that new admin user and use regular copy to a separate disk (preferably an external NTFS formatted drive).

C:\Users
C:\ProgramData
Any of those special directories that you or a program might have made in the root of C:\
C:\dell
C:\Drivers
C:\dell.sdr

Now, no matter what, even if everything goes wrong, you can always rebuild your laptop from scratch with Windows 11 and get your data and software back.

Backups are supposed to automate the things above, but sometimes they run into things they don't handle well, like indexing the files Chris mentioned.

I hope this helps somehow.  Feel free to ask me questions.

-Janet

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[Janet E. Lewis]

Hi Charles,

Since you have a Dell laptop, you can go to the Dell support site and download the Windows 10 installer (well, they direct you to the MS site to download it).  Since it presumably came with Windows 10, the installation will see the serial number/service tag in BIOS and recognize it as having an OEM license.  So, any old Windows installation disk or USB key will work. If your laptop is new enough to have Dell drivers for Windows 11 - for example, Win11 was available for that laptop when you bought it but you chose to get Win10 instead - then you can just download the Windows 11 and it will install with the OEM information.

If you do not have a Microsoft Account to log into your laptop now (you're using a local account), try Rufus to create an installer USB stick where you can tell it to bypass that and let you use a local account.  I don't know if this still works with Windows 11 Home, but it does work with Windows 11 Pro. 

If you really want to have a true replica of your laptop HD, partitions and all, you do generally need backup software you pay for.  Some of them let you try it first, but generally have some sort of limitation, like size of the disk being imaged.

There is one other thing I've run into.  If you have an SSD drive (M.2 nVME), sometimes backup software gets confused by I don't know what.  There's usually some sort of setting that tells it to ignore bad sectors.  If you've already run chkdsk and there aren't any errors (or you let chkdsk fix them with /r), then this is worth a try.  It worked with Macrium, anyway.

-Janet

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