By Patrick Nelson
Microsoft’s User State Migration Tool (USMT) is a scriptable command-line tool for Windows 7 user state migrations.
It’s similar to Windows Easy Transfer, except more automated.
Easy Transfer is geared towards migrating the user states of just a few computers, whereas USMT is for large-scale migrations.
USMT is not recommended by Microsoft for migrations that need end-user involvement or any machine-by-machine customization.
USMT migrates user accounts, operating system and application settings to Windows 7.
It preserves the user state over the upgrade reducing end-user downtime, so consequently lowers costs.
Users do not have to customize their desktops, or find missing files. This improves the end-user’s experience with the upgrade too.
USMT has two principal elements ScanState and LoadState.
There are also a set of modifiable .xml files, plus you can create your own .xml files.
The ScanState tool scans the source computer. It collects the files and settings and creates a store.
LoadState migrates the files and settings using compression to a temporary location on the Windows 7 destination machine. It then decompresses the material and puts the file in the correct location.
The compression can be turned off for testing but it does help with bandwidth usage.
A config.xml file can be used to specify Windows 7 components to exclude.
Manifest files control what and how operating system and Internet Explorer settings are migrated to Windows 7.
As with all operating system upgrades, planning is crucial.
Before deploying USMT, IT needs to decide what to migrate and identify redundancy.
Microsoft TechNet has a Windows 7 migration planning guide for USMT which you can read here.
It covers choosing a store type, testing and best practices, amongst other things.
The latest version is USMT 4.0.
Changes from 3.0 include improved space estimates for the data; a hard-link migration store for computer-refresh hard-link stores are stored locally improving space requirements; and offline data gathering with ScanState.
Domain controller access is no longer needed. There is now integration with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT.)
Error control is a new section in the Config.xml file it allows you to configure which errors to ignore.
There are new helper functions; volume shadow copy support; and local group migration is added.
There’s a new listfiles command and there are new encryption options using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES,) a stronger algorithm than in USMT 3.0.
Both LoadState and ScanState have new and changed command-line options in USMT 4.0.
Tip: Click here to run a free scan for Windows related errors
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