To Keep Windows.old or Not To Keep?

[Seymour Heiney]

Folks, I'm coming up on my one month upgrade anniversary, and I'm trying to better understand what benefit keeping Windows.old around on an external drive would be. I realize this folder will be automatically deleted 30 days post-upgrade (in my case from Windows 7) and the option to rollback will disappear. I am one of the lucky ones where the upgrade appears to have gone well, so it is doubtful I will revert back to W7.

Before I upgraded, I took a full system image using Macrium Reflect v6, and then another full image immediately after the upgrade. Is there any benefit to copying Windows.old to an external hard drive that I use for back ups? It is quite large (38g in my case) but space isn't a problem if it might provide some benefit later on. I know it contains all the files pre-upgrade, but I have backups of all my data and document files that were there before anyway (via the full image that I took before the upgrade), and I do a full image backup weekly.

So while I know W10 would use the .old data to revert back to W7 during the 30 day grace period, is there any benefit to keeping the .old data (on an external drive) beyond the 30 days post-upgrade?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Trouble]

is there any benefit to keeping the .old data (on an external drive) beyond the 30 days post-upgrade?

I don't really see any upside to keeping it.
Assuming that both your pre and post images are viable then it would seem that you have anything you might need going forward. The post image should already contain a copy of the Windows.OLD folder.
You should be able to mount it and explore it to confirm.

Browse backups
Mount images in Windows Explorer so that you browse the contents of the backup as if you were looking at a normal drive in Windows.

SOURCE: http://www.macrium.com/pages/features.aspx

 

[arrow199]

Folks, I'm coming up on my one month upgrade anniversary, and I'm trying to better understand what benefit keeping Windows.old around on an external drive would be. I realize this folder will be automatically deleted 30 days post-upgrade (in my case from Windows 7) and the option to rollback will disappear. I am one of the lucky ones where the upgrade appears to have gone well, so it is doubtful I will revert back to W7.

Before I upgraded, I took a full system image using Macrium Reflect v6, and then another full image immediately after the upgrade. Is there any benefit to copying Windows.old to an external hard drive that I use for back ups? It is quite large (38g in my case) but space isn't a problem if it might provide some benefit later on. I know it contains all the files pre-upgrade, but I have backups of all my data and document files that were there before anyway (via the full image that I took before the upgrade), and I do a full image backup weekly.

So while I know W10 would use the .old data to revert back to W7 during the 30 day grace period, is there any benefit to keeping the .old data (on an external drive) beyond the 30 days post-upgrade?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

Once your 1mth date has passed you will no longer have the option to downgrade and the windows.old folder will be of no use. You can have a poke around in there but you won't find any thing worth keeping. I read a post where the author had a theory that renaming the windows.old folder plus two other files which windows uses to downgrade would prolong the month as windows wouldn't be able to find them, His theory didn't work as windows still removed the downgrade option anyway. I deleted my windows.old folder manually. After a couple of initial niggles I am very happy with W10 and see it as a natural progression of W7 so I wouldn't go back now as W7 support will eventually end, although, I have imaged W7 like you just in case!

 

[Russell Painton]

I deleted the .old folder after about a week of using 10. I had no intention of reverting after I found out how good 10 was so, I freed up many gig s of disk space.

 

[hTconeM9user]

I deleted the .old folder after about a week of using 10. I had no intention of reverting after I found out how good 10 was so, I freed up many gig s of disk space.

Same here windows 10 is the one to be on, anyone who does not upgrade in a year will be kicking themselves when the support ends and their machines become unstable,

 

[Seymour Heiney]

Hello folks, back again, sorry was out of town on business and had no time for personal stuff. Just wanted to respond and say how thankful I am for you guys replying and offering your insight. I never want to be "that guy" who posts questions and then doesn't even have the decency to thank those whom try and help.

Anyway, you've confirmed what I already believed my path forward should be. I'm about to gain some substantial gb back on my spinner. Thank you very much!

 

[chrunos]

The Windows.old folder gives you an extra layer of protection when you reinstall Windows. When you do a clean install off a retail Windows 7 DVD, the installation protects your files by putting them into that folder. So do many of the restoration tools that come with PCs. Before they restore your hard drive to its factory condition, they move your files to C:\Windows.old and leave that folder alone.

Once you've set up all the user accounts, you should move your library folders (Documents, Photos, Music, and so on) from C:\Windows.old\Users to their equivalent folders in C:\Users. That way, Windows knows where to look for these files.

Windows 10 will erase the Windows.old folder to free up disk after 30 days automatically. To keep the Windows.old folder around for a couple of months, because you might discover that you need a file or two from it you can copy it to another location or use backup software.

 

[Gideon]

I removed mine as it uses a great deal of real estate on an SSD. I use Macrium Reflect so I had no need to keep it.