cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/40885318
I’m going to switch from Windows 11 to Linux soon but first I wish to backup every every data and config files I can in my current Windows installation, even those that wouldn’t natively work in Linux. I know the \Users folder is important to back up, but I don’t know what other directories I am missing.
Buy a new hard drive/SSD for your Linux installation. Put your Windows drive away in a drawer so all of its contents are saved, and you can swap it back in if you have to. A USB adapter can be helpful for retrieving files.
But first before you buy a new SSD don’t forget to go back to September of last year.
If you have enough space for it, just keep it in the PC.
- C:/Users > all user data from all users on the PC
or just from a single user
%userprofile%/AppData
%userprofile%/documents
%userprofile%/(everything else like pictures, videos, etc.) - C:/ProgramData > some programs saving files here, so all users can use the data
- C:/Program Files > majority of programs are installed here
- C:/Program Files (86x) > some programs are installed here
- C:/Users > all user data from all users on the PC
Resize your Windows partition to be smaller, then install Linux in the newly-freed space. You can boot into GParted to resize the partition.
Yeah, you’re gonna want to back up your drive first? Before you start messing with partitioning tools.
Exactly! Your user data is stored in
c:\users. This includes, well, your user data for all of the users, including all user-spefific configuration files and application data and actual files and directories created by the user.Unfortunately lots of configuration is stored in the registry and is useless for transitioning them over to Linux. Same with most Windows software that doesn’t use the registry. You’ll unfortunately also find configuration files all.over the place. Might it be in the application’s installation directory
c:\ProgramData, or somewhere else.Best option is a new seperate drive of course.
But besides that I can recommend making a image of the drive ans storing it somewhere. This way you can flash everything back, there would be a ton of applications that would not run if you try and restore the files only.
Last option should be to customly copy files from folders around. This would not guarantee you can restore Windows. But you maybe would be able to restore config at a much lower storage amount
In such cases I usually do a disk image copy after I remove apps that aren’t required. That way I have all the files and I can boot it in a virtual machine if necessary.
%appdata% has a lot of it. Also while you’re there go up a folder, and have more folders with config and data files specific to either windows and/or programs and games.
Mainly the users folder(s) e.g. c:\users\YOURUSERNAME , the hidden appdata\local and appdata\roaming folders in there probably contain way more than you actually need to back up but you could back up the whole thing to be on the safe side. Most of your user’s program configuration data is in those folders.
Sometimes systemwide program config data is in the hidden c:\programdata folder but I wouldn’t back that up aside from specific programs you really want to save config info for.
Aside from that any other folders you created containing data you care about.
And like the other comment mentioned, the Windows registry also has lots of program config data but I usually skip that, the majority of it is useless… but if there’s a great need for you to export a specific registry tree you could do that via the command prompt to export to a backup text file. I think reg export would do it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/reg-export
