I volunteer at a small computer repair shop and one of my tasks is finding new and better tools to do our jobs. Due to all sorts of myriad issues we need a program to handle these situations: * Must support copying individual files and/or directories * NTFS ACL / Permission issues * Bad Sectors * Locked / In-Use Files * Verify files (or fragments) successfully copied, preferably by checksum * Must support copying to a networked drive * Must be able to copy files offline Basically what we need is a raw copy. So far we've been using Ghost for this task, Ghosting the entire drive, even when all we really need is just the user data and system configuration (\Users, \Windows\system32\config). We've tried several solutions but they don't do everything we need. For instance, robocopy doesn't do raw copying, and even if it did, its verification is not a checksum (just checks file sizes), which is not 100% safe over the network. However Ghosting is horribly inefficient as we are taking ages to ghost >100GB of data when we only need ~10GB. Any ideas? I'm about ready to try writing my own using a batch script and several different tools (by processing logs of files that failed to be copied). I'm also looking into tools to use in Linux, rather than my usual "Mini Windows" rescue environment. (Note: The main reason we're backing up user data is because of infection and Windows corruption that cannot (easily) be resolved without reinstall.)
You could try User State Migration Tool from MS or User Profile Wizard. Doesnt do EVERYTHING however they are quite handy. I, too, would like to know of some others if anyone else has any.