How to backup or archive your Windows 10 profile to an External Disk Drive or USB Flash Drive

The simplest way of backing up or archiving your data in 2025 is to back it up to the cloud using OneDrive, iCloud or Google Drive

However, not everyone trusts the cloud and has privacy concerns, so the 2nd easiest way in 2025 to secure your data is to backup or archive to an External Disk Drive (HDD) or a USB flash drive.

External Hard Drives tend to have more storage and are cheaper. The cheaper versions still utilise HDD’s (Hard-Disk-Drives) whereas the newer and more expensive versions utilise SSD’s (Solid-State-Drives)

A USB Flash-Drive is basically a smaller version of a SSD drive and usually come in smaller sizes such as 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB.

So you basically have 3 purchase options depending on the amount of data you need to backup/archive

How much data do I need to backup?

Open File Explorer > This PC > Users > (your username) … hover over your username, right-click and select “Properties” and you will see the total size f your user profile (example below)

Click on File Explorer

Select the “C:” Drive (Local Disk)

Click on “Users”

Select the User that you normally use, such as Your Name (eg fredsmith) or the one that has the most recent “Date Modified” … in this example it is called “Default” and will differ depending on how the computer was originally setup

Hovering over the user directory do a “right-click: and then click on “Properties”

This will show you the size of the user profile. In this example it is only 1.48 or 1.57 MB but it could be hundreds of MB or even many GB (Gigabytes)

How to Backup/Archive my profile to External Drive or USB Flash Drive

Plugin your USB Flash-drive or External Drive and it should appear in the bottom left of the Explorer window as a D: or E: drive.

Now highlight the user-profile (see above), right-click and select “Copy”

Now highlight the D: or E: Drive as detailed above, and right-click and select “Paste”

Files will now start to copy to the external drive (E: drive in this example). If insufficient space on the external drive, you will get an error and the operation will stop. Free up space on the external-drive or re-format it, then repeat the copy-paste process.

The copy process may take from a couple of minutes to many hours to complete, depending on the amount of data to transfer.

Once complete, remove the external drive or USB and store in a safe place (if archiving) or connect to the new Windows 11 Machine and copy paste only the files you require to be on the new machine.

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