Forum Discussion
MicrosoftWhen replacing PCs, how are you migrating files and settings from old to new PCs?
MicrosoftThis sounds like it is the most common way - even for large enterprises - and some are using scripts or detailed command lines (copied from Notepad for example) that automatically copy desired locations and skip unwanted file types, etc.
I'm kind of surprised that it scales to manually visit each desktop in PC replacement scenarios, since they might be 20-40% of PC's you'll move in the next 12-18 months. Would it save you time to have a sample script or command line(s) to repeat with physical desktop interaction, or would you still prefer manual copying?
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 :)
- JeremyChapmanMSFT
Thanks 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
