Forum Discussion
MicrosoftWhen replacing PCs, how are you migrating files and settings from old to new PCs?
Well, scripts can fail or they have to be very complex. I find it not so much difficult to just connect to old PC C$, quickly copy paste a few folders and wait for it to copy (over 1 Gbit switch). If it fails on some files (long names, etc.) i can react immediately. With scripts i would have to do some error logging and then check the logs. It might save a few hours in the long run (for all PCs). But as we change 30-50 PCs per year, it's not a big deal in my book. And as i've said we are planning to use OneDrive. We also set a few settings manually (although some are set through a script adding ini files, importing reg files, adding shortcuts, etc.).
Anyway, we still save A LOT of time by cloning (Windows install, apps, drivers). Cloning new PC takes 10 minutes, and installing from scratch can take hours. No, we don't use sysprep, WDS, etc. Just simple exact clone with Clonezilla :)
MicrosoftThanks Oleg! If you were doing 30-50 per day/week/month, do you think you would hire more people or automate this process? I get that one device per week is pretty doable manually, but what if you had ~20k PCs and rolled ~4k of them to new devices per year? (Note: I'm still hearing a preference from some folks for manual state migration at this scale, hence my questions).
Moving to disk cloning... do you have a finite number of device types and disk sizes? DO you need an image per device type? Are you using BIOS or UEFI?
I use a software called Runtime shadow copy--https://www.runtime.org/shadow-copy.htm
for all data retrival Im a small business that does data retrival I like because it copies all data
as long as a specified folder is ? to a external drive im just learning how to do this any other idears would be very helpful
Actually, we usually do all the changes per 1-2 months. Depends on a user and the amount of data. But sometimes i'm able to change 3-4 PCs per day (that includes unpacking everything, cloning, preparing user environment, moving user's data and swapping PCs physically). We have good checklists/procedures and over the years i'm just so good at it :D But it is strange for me to hear someone is doing the same with 20k PCs. Maybe it is just easier to do it the old way than to try to setup everything for automatic deployment. I have tested WDS a few years ago. It was too complex for what it did and sysprep still left a lot of things to setup and it took much longer than cloning (it was with Win7 at that point).
Usually we have one new model every year. Though this year it is 3 new models. So will do 3 images. Although with Windows 10 i started not to install drivers manually as it pulls everything on its own. It would probably even work with one image for all, but it is safer to have separate. We don't usually clone old PCs when reusing them. But i keep their images around if we should need to quickly rebuild one (after disk or motherboard replacement). If we do this, i usually do a new image for this model after it updates everything.
Unfortunately Clonezilla won't work with UEFI, so BIOS.
