Cant use windows 8.1 Windows Easy Transfer on Windows 8.1

What kind of f'in madness is this from M$? I'm not looking to back up my music collection! I don't even own a damn Xbox and I never will. What I do have is 10GB of photos that I need transferred from my 8.1 to my former girlfriend's Windows 7 machine. I have is a USB 2 Host-to-Host link adapter cable that I bought a couple of years ago and plugged it into her Win 7 box. Magically Windows 7's WET popped right up and said that it's ready to go. I haven't used this cable since I upgraded to 8.1. I look at my 8.1 screen expecting to see the same - nope - nothing. So I go looking for it and it's AWOL. Getting pissed I started looking online and landed here and found out that M$ screwed me.

I am not about to upload 10GB of photos to SkyDrive and then download them to her Win 7 box. To **** with that lunacy.

Does anyone know of another way to help me out of my dilemma? I'm sure there are several ways - none of them involving backing up my files (I have that covered already, M$) nor my imaginary Xbox. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Your only real option is the User State Migration Tool its available when installing the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) for Windows 8.1       ADKSetup.exe

Its not as easy to use as the old easy transfer wizard but It should work.

Hope this helps

OnTheWeb said, "When you go up to a user's system, you now have to care about where their files, where they put them, and possibly multiple user accounts.   If they are moving to a new PC, what are you going to do? Manually move all their stuff, desktop, email settings, browser settings and all the rest?"

You had better have been doing that before... caring about where their files were.  Too many times have I seen users who created and utilized folders on C: - where ever they wanted... C:\MyStuff or such.  F.A.S.T. and W.E.T. would routinely miss those as well as other programs (Firefox, Chrome, etc.) that many users utilized and things had to be done manually.

I'd either use a third party tool made to do such things as this (LapLink products have always been great at this), do a fast survey of the system and copy the necessary files to an external drive and/or image the old system so the possibility of loss is a minimal thing... or if they were in a corporate environment - it likely wasn't a concern due to policies of where users save data, etc.

W.E.T. and F.A.S.T were not meant to be a BACKUP solution.  They actually miss too much to be thought of in that manner without jumping through hoops to make sure you get the other stuff - and then it is very inefficient and proprietary - not so easy to get single things out of in comparison to the actual backup solutions out there.  Seriously - restore the W.E.T. file to a VM and grab the single file when you could have used a real backup solution and just gotten the file with possibly a copy/paste function?!  I thought you were talking about home/consumer level users here - how many of them would be setting up VMs/have the resources for that? hah

I don't know if there are any stats for such a thing.  In Windows 7 - the similar feature worked without any setup by default for some locations.  http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/recover-lost-or-deleted-files

File versions are not usually 'backups', however.  Although that can be a part of backups these days - backups are copies of the original files onto external (geographically) locations that are important to someone.  That's the main level.  After that you can make image backups of the system, etc. as a secondary backup.  File history is more of a convenience for those who might mess up every so often and need to go back a version or two of a file.

There are all kinds of corporate strategies possible, but not having it is an unnecessary complication for PEBKAC's.    When you go up to a user's system, you now have to care about where their files, where they put them, and possibly multiple user accounts.   If they are moving to a new PC, what are you going to do? Manually move all their stuff, desktop, email settings, browser settings and all the rest?

WET It's a very effective backup solution when you have no other option.   A couple of clicks and it dumps everything but software onto a drive for every user account.  No, you can't bring back a single file, but in many cases you need all of their data back.   It saves a lot of screwing around and eliminates things being missed.      Besides, if you need an individual file you just restore the WET to a VM and grab it.

As for the file-version protection - of course it is not a backup in default - but if setup in certain ways, it can be.  The main thing, if it is stored on the same system as the original, it is not a backup (never was.)

I'd like to see the stats of how many people even have the file version protection turned on or know about it.

It is not a big mistake, it is an EPIC GREEK Tragedy.   It is what many people used to make back-ups, and certainly what was used to move around between computers, even a Win7 to Win7 move to different hardware, which can't be done on a similar fashion in Win8.

I can't fathom the absolute inconceivableness of this decision.

Anyone that thinks file-version protection is a backup is in for a rude awakening.

People (much less many?!) used Windows Easy Transfer/Files and Settings Transfer as a backup solution?  I have not heard of that and I would definitely have not recommended it (and have not.)  ;-)

Truthfully - other than IT professionals - likely a very low percentage of people used F.A.S.T. or W.E.T. themselves (on a personal level.)  I'm not saying that getting rid of this consumer-level option (that Laplink did for years before and still does now) is necessarily a good thing - but I am not sure it is at as dramatic level as some are making it.

As for the file-version protection - of course it is not a backup in default - but if setup in certain ways, it can be.  The main thing, if it is stored on the same system as the original, it is not a backup (never was.)