Use of Robocopy to restore PC (Win7)

Question

I am seeking to restore a Win7 PC on a different physical Win7 PC.

On 28th June I did a Win7 backup of the PC (which had both C: & D: HDD). On the 30th June I did a Robocopy of each of C: & D:.

On a different PC I have restored (not recovered) the C: & D: HDD using Win7 restore. The restore is working fine.

I can see from the Robocopy copies that significant changes happened to C: and D: in the intervening 2 days.

I would like to copy these changes (and only these changes if possible) from my backup to the C: and D: HDD.

I am thinking something like robocopy <source> <destination> /xo .... is what is needed but am uncomfortable about my understanding of Robocopy to commit to this.

A possible alternative is just to /mir both HDDs.

However, from the manual at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/robocopy I am not clear of the consequences of either of these choices.

Is anyone able to recommend how to proceed?

Thanks.

Answer 1

A possible alternative is just to /mir both HDDs.

Don't do that. You don't want to touch OS and application folders that are all inter-dependent and have corresponding registry entries. Focus on specific data folders like c:\Users\MyAccount\Documents.

Use the /l switch to test with. It will tell robocopy to list the files/folders that it would copy without actually moving any data. Pick one folder to start with. Do a test run with /l and verify that it's going to copy the files that you want/expect.

For each data folder you need to decide if the source or the destination contains the most current data. /Mir will overwrite/delete any file on the destination that does not match the source. If you have updated files on the destination folder and want to keep them then use /xo.