What's the right way to factory reset an Xbox One with external drive?

I've got a problem with my Xbox One and the official troubleshooters told me to do a factory reset. I've got a few hundred gigs of downloaded games that I wanted to save, so I hooked up an external drive and copied them over. After the reset, I was unable to get the Xbox to offer me the option of copying them back, so I think I did something wrong:

1. Connected the drive, formatted it to hold games
2. Copied (not moved) the games to the external drive (so the game management screens showed the game data in both internal and external storage)
3. Powered off the Xbox, disconnected the external drive
4. Powered on the Xbox, performed full factory reset
5. Powered down, reconnected the external drive, powered back up again.

After all of that, the console seems confused: it lists the games as having been installed, but the game management pages don't show the usual icons, nor do they show the external drive as having a copy of the game. Attempting to launch the games takes me to the Xbox store, where the usual "download" button shows either "Play" or "Launch". Clicking on it does nothing but refresh the store page (it doesn't even start the download in the background).

Note that the Xbox has recognised the drive and shows it with the right amount of data on it: I'm confident that there's no problem with the drive itself.

If I disconnect the external drive and start reinstalling the games, then reconnect the external, it still doesn't show them on the external drive.

I had a chat with Microsoft support last night, which was a complete waste of 90 minutes: the adviser didn't seem to know much about Xboxes and constantly misunderstood the problem. She seemingly decided that the data on the external drive was corrupted, but didn't say this to me for half an hour, she just kept going on about how if I'd kept up my Live subscription, I'd have all my game data (not just the saves) stored in the Cloud. I kept pointing out that this didn't solve my problem, as I was trying to avoid 160GB of downloads, never mind that it seemed unlikely that Microsoft would use cloud storage to backup game data when you could just download it again from the store anyway. She also said that using an external drive as a backup to avoid downloading games again was not supported by Microsoft, which I figure essentially means that they've not managed or not bothered to create any official process by which a user can back up their games locally.

So here's my question: should I have left the external drive attached and powered up during the factory reset? Would it have left the games on the external drive and still recognised that they were there after the reset, allowing me to copy them back?

Failing that, what's the generally accepted method for backing up Xbox One game downloads?

Thanks in advance.

you should be able to change the games stored data to the external device not the internal hard drive.

What do you mean by that? Move the game data to the external drive instead of copying it? Does that make it possible for the console to find the data after a factory reset? I would have thought that if there was any information on the console which pointed at the external drive as the only location to find the data, it would be wiped when the console was reset, leaving me in exactly the situation I was already in: data on the external drive that the console won't recognise.

Has anyone successfully backed up their game data before a reset and successfully restored it afterwards?

NJMorf said:

What do you mean by that? Move the game data to the external drive instead of copying it? Does that make it possible for the console to find the data after a factory reset? I would have thought that if there was any information on the console which pointed at the external drive as the only location to find the data, it would be wiped when the console was reset, leaving me in exactly the situation I was already in: data on the external drive that the console won't recognise.

Has anyone successfully backed up their game data before a reset and successfully restored it afterwards?

It should detect the data on the external drive using the USB on the side of the Xbox. If you haven't already done a factory rest it as it won't affect the external device.
And could i know what you are doing e.g moving the games to a new xbox or adding them back to the current one.

As I said above, I was following troubleshooting instructions from Microsoft, so I wanted to restore the game data to the same console it came from. The external drive was disconnected at the time I did the factory reset, and the console either could not find or would not accept the data on the external drive after I finished the reset. I don't recall whether I initially reconnected the external drive before or after I applied all of the updates to the console.