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My home PC has a dying hard drive.

We have backups of most of the important files, but there's a lot of settings we have that we'd like to save. There's also a question of if our kids have been putting their important files in the proper locations to be picked up by our backups.

We have a Windows 10 machine, and have already replaced the main drive with a new one and installed Windows 10.

I know Microsoft used to offer a free tool for transferring settings, but that offer seems to have expired.

What do I need to do to copy Windows settings as well as other files from an external USB drive?

In the past, I've tried simply pulling data from the external USB drive, but that doesn't work so well when it's pulling from 'protected' spaces on the drive (like User files in Windows).

fixer1234
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Jeff
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    @yoonix They should remove comments on migration. Most of the time they're just comments saying that it's offtopic. – Carcigenicate Apr 15 '17 at 22:30
  • Yeah, they should. So, I hope this is a better spot for it! And I hope there's a good answer! – Jeff Apr 15 '17 at 23:04
  • Please take a look at our answers within the possible duplicate that I referenced. You should be able to utilize an account with admin privileges to gracefully backup everything that you need to an external USB drive. I do that every time I reload a Windows machine on my home network. – Run5k Apr 15 '17 at 23:51
  • @Run5k: Yeah, that's not an option. The hard drive is already taken out, and won't run consistently for more than about 10 minutes. I figure I can get an hour or so out of it using the freezer trick and positioning the external enclosure properly, but I can't make use of answers that require the drive to be the active system disk. – Jeff Apr 16 '17 at 07:01
  • Understood, but you should still have enough time to copy the contents of the standard user folders that we mentioned within our answers. – Run5k Apr 16 '17 at 09:37

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