I'm currently in the process of backing up multiple PCs, Linux and Windows, and there is a serious PITA with Windows boxes.
I have a lot of data I need to back up and merge, some of which is being dragged from Win 98 or something era, via "My Documents" upgrades to the next version, some of which was copied by brute force when updating HDDs, and some of the data is produced by apps that have been used relatively recently.
So there is some data under "Program Files (x86)", some of it is in "My Documents" or "Documents", something seems to be under "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore", something goes into Public profiles, and they have some dummy sample data as well, and ton of other places. With Win7 it also seems that there is a ton of junction points, so robocopying works with extra switches, but I'm not sure it does what I need. And it definitely has all the extra crap like profile specific temp files and stuff which is heavy and unneeded. Like NTUSER.DAT and registry hives or something, if I understand correctly.
Does anyone know a good checklist by which I could avoid copying whole "My Documents" folders, but not leave anything behind? As of now it's nightmare, I know about 10 places to look, but I'm really not sure it's everything.
Doing anything in Windows seems awful after getting used to Linux.