Windows 10: Moving AppData from drive H (different installation) destroyed AppData on C?!

I had a previous installation of Windows, that got screwed by a BIOS update, as a mirror on another drive... I kept it in order to be able to restore things that I'd still need. Now I wanted to clean up, archive those files and format the drive for further use. Despite some rights issues it worked reasonably well for ProgramData etc. But of course I also wanted to archive the Users folder.

To do so I moved the files onto a drive formatted ExFAT, so that 7zip could actually access them. At no point did I touch the system drive C.

While moving the files using RoboCopy (using the /E and /move option) I noticed the system going haywire, and, lo and behold, the AppData folder on C started looking quite empty. It looks like for some reason RoboCopy saw that it had moved files from a folder on drive H fine, and decided to delete that folder on C. I guess some symlink issue?!

I tried recovering the AppData folder using Shadow Explorer, which appeared to work. Just that most programs recognized that settings were there, but thought they were messed up. I then proceeded to restore a system recovery point, which, thanks to a recent Windows update, was only 2 days old. This appeared to work well... until I tried to start programs. Firefox seems to be relatively fine, at least my last session was restored. Plugins are gone though, and reddit for example doesn't work properly (using Edge to post this). Atom does not start at all. Notepad++ lost the sessions, including unsaved tabs. Slack got logged out (no big deal, this one). Ditto lost everything too. This is pretty bad - I REALLY hate reinstalling my system as it takes months to get it running as I want it. And that's when I am able to copy settings.

Any idea what I could still do? What went wrong? Why system recovery didn't work properly? One Notepad++ XML file is empty. Another was fine, except that it had several empty rows inserted into the middle of it. Other config files seem to be cut off in the middle. Etc.



Besides, I could not get proper ownership to the folders from my previous installation... why? I did go to the properties and then to the security tab, updated the owner to my user account, added the user account with full access to the files, ... but no chance. I kept getting access denied.

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:)

 

How do I access the appdata folder when it is not my C:\ drive?

My google foo is failing me today so I come to the forums for help. I need to be able to see (copy) the appdata path (C:\users\username\appdata), but cannot seem to get permissions to even see it. I need to copy the Minecraft save data for my kiddo before I SE this drive and put a fresh W10 on it.



I am certain I am missing something easy.

TIA!

 

%appdata% on Failed Drive | Move Thunderbird Profile to New Drive

%appdata% is just an enviroment variable that the system uses as a shortcut to C:\Users\xxxxxxxx\AppData\Roaming

xxxxxxxx is your user account. If you open a Command Prompt and enter echo %appdata% you would see something like this (what shows on my PC).

C:\Users\ztruk>echo %appdata%
C:\Users\ztruk\AppData\Roaming

so as clam1952 said, show hidden files and folders then you can browse for it on the old drive. The difference being the drive letter will not be C:, it will be what ever letter the system has assigned to that drive/partition.

 

Moving Appdata folder

Unfortunately, as you have noticed, there's just some things that can't be changed and that Folder is one of them and each User gets it. If I want to save room on the boot drive I do Custom installs of programs [usually a choice in the early stage of the install], haven't found but a few that don't allow that which I consider to be remiss on the part of those programmers. Even though the programs may show in AppData they may also show in C:\Programs Files or C:\Program Files (x86) Folders on 64-bit Windows or C:\Program Files Folder on 32-bit Windows. There will also be data related to those programs in C:\ProgramData. Quite complicated.