A simple and secure way to transfer user data to a non-system disk.

Brief introduction

A misfortune happened to me for the new year: I dropped my file bin from a height of one and a half meters (Hitach 1 TB), as it turned out - the fall was fatal ... I looked at the prices and decided to buy a system SSD instead of a new dust bin, and make the existing 500 gig hitachi a garbage dump , tuning and document storage and location of various programs that do not require a fast SSD. the choice fell on the 60 gigovy OCZ Vertex 3, which was bought, now I had the task of removing the system and user garbage on the 2nd screw, which will be covered by the further narration ...

Preparing for dangerous experiments

Immediately after installing the system, drivers and the minimum required set of programs (browser, archiver, torrent, adobrider, etc.) and setting up the system for working with SSD, it was decided to archive the system (by that time the entire C drive weighed 30GB) and it was done. Then there were a lot of different attempts to transfer folders without editing the registry and environment variables. As a result, I went back to the VHD image I created and used copies of the folders from there, but first things first, and now I’ll just note that the system image ended up being just needed and not so much due to the fact that the system is returned several times from non-existence ...

Misconception 1: Migrate the entire Users folder.

At first, I tried to move the entire Users folder, but during the copying process, first of all, there was a cloud of access errors, and as a result, after deleting the original Users folder, the system refused to work even in safe mode (I’d just like to say that, among other things, I set myself a restriction to use only the current system (without 2nd computer, 2nd system and LiveCD)). Here I needed the image of the system for the 1st time to restore it.
In the end, I realized that you shouldn’t touch the Users / Default folder in principle and decided to transfer user folders exactly.
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Misconception 2: To transfer user data, it is enough to create another account with administrator rights.

Then I decided to transfer the data of user X from user Y, so that there are no X files open in some process. For such a trick, I had to change the owner of the user's folder to begin with, and then do it again. I finally created Junction Point and logged in with user X ... eventually it turned out that without admin rights some (not all) programs refuse to write data in AppData, and the uTorrent program could not create conformance to * .torrent files (for some reason this also failed), in the end I made the 2nd rollback.

Archiving is gut

Now I decided to act differently: I updated the archive files, mounted the VHD file that is created when the system was archived, and copied my X folder from this image, so no change of ownership was required and no access errors occurred during copying.
Next, the Unlocker program was downloaded and the user X folder was deleted (when rebooting). It remains only to create a link to the directory, which can be done from the 2nd administrator account or, if there is no such record, from the safe mode. Such a link is created using the tools built into the Windows utility, called from the command line with the mklink command, its syntax is plainly disgraceful: mklink parameter link destination, where parameter is the type of link being created (I used / J).

Dry total

So, let's list the actions done in the final, successful attempt:
1) Archiving
2) Transferring files from an archive copy
3) Delete the initial files
4) Link creation
-This sequence of actions is universal, simple enough and reliable, I hope it will seem so not to me alone.

useful links

Hub Browser Article Grox
Habrayuzer catbegemot article