I've asked around a number of forums to learn about the least-troublesome, most-straightforward means of backing up the "AppData" folder from an external laptop disk drive onto an external storage device.
To offer full context of the issue, the hard drive from my laptop was affected by an operating system error that triggers an endless loop of "Automatic Repair" reboots. It was recommended that I should back up my "Users" directory from the drive as a failsafe to protect my drive's information before applying a fix to correct the problem. I was able to perform simple copy-and-paste backups on most of the Users folder's contents individually, but many previous attempts to do so had been stymied by the "AppData" folder, which didn't respond to a copy-and-paste backup, and had even prevented the duplication of other files within the same Users directory if grouped together in the process due to "administrator permission" error messages.
While doing some online searches about what to do, I found a pair of links to this forum ([1]; [2]) that seemed relevant to my issue, and thought I'd ask my question here. If anyone believes they would need to refer to my other forum posts elsewhere, I'd be happy to include a list of my other assorted forum questions upon request; specific details about the pertinent hardware, available support devices, and a myriad of other user recommendations given to address the issue would be found therein.
The affected computer is an HP Pavilion laptop which runs Windows 10; if any further specifics are needed, I would be willing to provide such details upon request as well.
10/16/2023 EDIT: I've included an additional series of links to help provide some further context on the issue; some are comments of my own, while others are recommended from replies by other forum users. Hopefully, they will be of some use to anyone willing to offer advice.
Microsoft link 1 (ATTN: RobinsonSilvestre reply)
Microsoft link 2 (ATTN: Derrick19 reply)
A few others can be found among the comments below; sorry, but I'm too new of a user to add any more here. Thanks!
10/17/2023 EDIT: Oddly, I can't see the aforementioned comments I had beneath this post; it contained a few other links that I thought may have been pertinent to my question, so I hope those comments are possibly visible for other users, because I don't see them here on my end. I doubt I will be able to directly add more here (I'm limited in the number of links I can post as a new user), but I will try to include them again later if possible -- not to say what is still visible wouldn't be of value. If this is some kind of error that an Admin might be able to correct, I hope that could be managed somehow.
