Deploying and Administering Windows Vista® Bible

Chapter 5. Migrating User Data

Odds are you have replaced one or two home computers over the last several years. Although you may have been happy to start fresh, you still spent the first hours customizing your desktop, shortcuts, favorites, and even configuring options in your favorite programs to get everything just so. In a corporate environment, you may have some users happy with a fresh start and many more that are not happy for the inconvenience. Regardless of how they feel about it, it is important to consider your experience and the time it took and then think about this on a scale of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of systems. The disruption in service, the hours spent getting things back to how they should be can cost a company millions. Even something as trivial as a background wallpaper image can impact an organization if you consider that there could be thousands of people searching for that lost image and then trying to figure out how to set their background in Windows Vista. Extrapolate this example to application settings, shortcuts, Internet settings, and "favorites," and the importance of user data and settings migration becomes clear. In this chapter, we go over user data migration and some tools available to see you through the task.

Understanding User Data

A growing number of organizations are doing what they can to keep data off local workstations. The most obvious benefit is that server shares are routinely backed up. If something happens to the ...