Windows 7 Logged on with a temporary profile

[guest]

I'm having a problem where after power faliure during a reboot Windows says there's a problem with the user profile and logs me in to a temporary one. This happens both with my personal account and the Administrator one.

I found this guide which explains how to fix the issue, but the problem is that I'd rather not backup my user folder, because it's pretty heavy - not sure of the exact amount, but it could be tens or hundreds of GBs. I thought that maybe I could copy the system files from that folder to another one and rename them, but that doesn't seem to work, because everything I do while in the temporary profile is undone at logout.

I could delete the user account and let Windows keep the files, but then I'd run into the same problem: it's a really big folder, and restoring it would take a very long time. Plus, I'm not sure if I would lose stuff that Windows doesn't back up, like saved games in AppData.

[guest]

Something I just realized may have something to do with this. My Users folder is actually on a separate partition, and C:\Users is a symlink pointing to it.

My goal is to find out how to restore my profile; everything I mentioned until now is what I tried and couldn't do for whatever reason. Does anyone know of a better method, or of a way to backup my user folder without waiting hours and hours for it to copy?