I've personally used USMT in projects to migrate hundreds of thousands of profiles. It works great.
What you seem to be missing is that "Windows Easy Transfer" was designed for a consumer or very small-business environment. In the enterprise, you adhere to some standards or you go crazy. Most enterprises take the opportunity, when doing desktop upgrades, to also do software upgrades (think Office, and Acrobat, and LOB apps, and etc.) and to install greater desktop discipline. Generally speaking, I will inform my project team to take a representative sample of desktops (given the size of the environment, between 5 and 10%) and scan them manually. Based on the results of that sample, we will prepare a migration plan that includes what is found in that sample. We document to the customer what is included, what is not included, what we will transfer, and examples of what we will not transfer. Based on that assessment, the client will ask for more or for less. There is a cost impact associated with that (takes longer or shorter, required more bandwidth or less, required more backup space or less, etc.) and it gets refactored back into adjusting the project plan. So, eventually, 95%+ of the desktops will be migrated according to the USMT plan. There are always white-glove (also called heavy-touch) migrations where you sit there and hold the hand of executives through every step of the process. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Klaus Hartnegg Sent: Friday, July 22, 2016 4:28 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [NTSysADM] User State Migration Tool unusable? Microsoft offers USMT (User State Migration Tool) to transfer settings from one Windows version to another, or from one PC to another. But while the older program "Easy Transfer" could (in Win7) be told to copy the whole directories appdata\roaming and documents, USMT copies only the files and directory which are specifically declared in xml files. They must be declared separately for each and every application. Example: USMT knows Firefox (version 3), but not Thunderbird. Wouldn't it be much easier, and must less risk of data loss, to replace the XML files with ones that simply copy the whole roaming and documents directories? What disadvantage would this have (except wasting a few megabytes, because not everything is really still needed)? And regarding the documents directories: from the XML files it appears that USMT transfers only files with certain filename extensions. Microsoft provides a rather long default list, but of course such a list can never be complete. Also I found that USMT silently skips all shortcuts which point to server directories, if they are not accessible during restore (which is nearly impossible to achieve, when a PC has more than one user, and each user has the home directory mapped to the same drive letter). Google found a recommendation to edit MigUser.xml, comment out "filter='MigXmlHelper.IgnoreIrrelevantLinks()'". I did this in the sections Desktop Files and Shared Desktop Files, but in my test this did not help. Am I the only one who thinks that this whole concept is insane, because it will almost unevitably lose important data?
