Overview of Migrating User Settings and Data by Using USMT

            USMT can be use in many user state migration scenarios. USMT offers a lots of set of features and capabilities that enables you to address your environment’s migration needs.

Benefits of USMT
USMT provides the following benefits to
organizations that deploy Windows operating
systems:

• It safely migrates user accounts, operating system settings, and application settings. It is customizable and highly scriptable, which increases automation in large-deployment scenarios. 
• It reduces the cost of deploying Windows operating systems by preserving user states. This reduces the time needed for users to become familiar with new operating systems, and this reduces the time required to customize desktops and locate missing files and settings.
• It reduces end-user downtime, which reduces help desk calls and increases employee satisfaction with the migration experience.
• It minimizes migration storage by using hard-link migration. For use in the computer refresh scenario, hard-link migration stores are saved locally on the computer that is being refreshed. It drastically improves migration performance, significantly reduces hard-disk utilization, reduces deployment costs, and enables entirely new migration scenarios. Hard-link migration store differs from other migration store types in that hard links are used to keep files stored on a source computer during the migration. Keeping files in place on a source computer eliminates the redundant work of duplicating files to an external storage location, which enables performance benefits and reduces disk utilization.
• It can perform migration from alternate locations (offline migration). This enables you to collect data from offline Windows operating systems by using the ScanState tool in the Windows Preinstallation Environment. In addition, USMT supports migrations from previous operating system installations contained in Windows.old directories.