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As one department (~170 persons) are in a transition to move to another department on new Windows 11 PCs I would like to move, not only relevant documents but preferably, the entire user profiles with them.

Most of their functions will remain the same. And so most relevant documents, used websites etc. will be the same as previously. Moving the desktop over would prevent them from having to start all over, setting up everything all over again.

We do use USMT (User State Migration Tool) as part of our deployment, but the new PCs are pre-deployed.

Also, even the latest Windows 11 USMT from the ADK does not include favorites etc from any of the latest browsers. Not even Edge.

9 Spice ups
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so if they are signed in with edge and have the profile feature, it moves it for them if i recall so long as they are signed into edge on both systems, edge sync i think it is called.
I think we used something like this

if they use one drive and sync stuff with one drive it generally works well just takes a little time to sync on new box.

1 Spice up
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My fear would-be that moving the whole user profile could conflict in may ways on a dissimilar system, should work, and will work have a million points to collide there.

User profiles will contain config files, HKCU registry, things that may have changes between systems, Sometimes it works with little to no observable issues, sometimes issues arrive months later with no seemingly immediate evident link. Lots of tools do it, some even do it well, but they all have caveats.

Best bet is a procedure to get all the details such as bookmarks file from chrome, anything you know has to be local but needs to move, script what you can.

Robocopy, a batch file, registry ex/imports, and some PowerShell utility scripts, can make a tech out of a monkey.

I have had great success giving people small local disk space, and forcing their data needs into central locations such as a home drive with a quota, forces data maintenance as being their burden, want 1000 MP3 files, then delete some of your kid’s birthday pictures and pintrest screenshots… So our actual locally stored data is in general very small. We can prep a computer and helpdesk can manually do the rest in round about 30 minutes downtime per user max, often way less.

Our windows 11 rollout will be clean slate, move the few important things, and tell the users, if you did not back it up to your H drive it will be gone.

Sounds extreme, but I rebuilt a call center where every Friday, peoples’ systems reimaged and came back up with a standard deploy. 600ish systems total. Users has private space on a server backed up, and learned quickly if they did not leave it there it would be gone on Monday. Made some people angry (Some even left, but few overall) and reduced a helpdesk staff of 15 to 4 who got decent raises, and live pretty chill lives now. I suspect their W11 rollout will be some trainings and a Monday morning! Nowadays, virtualization makes this almost silly easy, and how I would have done it then had the tech been as robust at the time.

Any temp company generally has a hundred PFYs chomping to get a foot in the door, a few temps with a check sheet can move mountains, and you can find good prospects that way too.

May not fit your project scope, but it is sound advice from years of experience :wink:

P.S. For anyone wondering OMG, 600 systems times a multiple GB image, what a network nightmare!? Though there are standard ways to do it with many imaging platforms who use multicast as well, we did it by a second partition which was the remainder of that drive we shrank to force them to their network drives, multicast the one image, save it there, so total network load was roughly the size of the image having gone to any one, not multiplied by how many…WOL brough them all up,. they copied local (if the image was modified), all rebooted and reimaged from the file on the second partition. Tinme to complete < 1hour across the board (Spinning drives back hen) Used KMS for activations, but with BIOS embedded product keys and SSD now, would be even easier.

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I’d still recommend you use USMT from Microsoft.

As you mention USMT is not very well maintained but you can get a fully updated free edition also supporting Windows 11 over at Ehlertech.

We use that version in our Endpoint Manager (SCCM) and for migrations to new win10/11 PCs we use the Ehlertech User Profile Central (UPC).

With UPC you can sit at your desktop and handle (backup/restore/move) user profiles remotely on all PCs on the domain

1 Spice up
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We’ve used USMT for User Profile Migrations for years. We run USMT with USMTGUI from Ehlertech, or more frequently these days we use their User Profile Central.
It is basically a GUI utilizing USMT.

It is however professional SW so you must pay for it but as it is quite cheap, really simple to use and includes premium support it really is an easy choice.

USMTGUI is updated to the latest Win 11 edition and has, since autumn 2019, been capable of migrating favorites etc. for the new Edge Chromium. Also the latest corporate versions from Autumn 2019 onward migrates profiles to Azure

Regarding Favorites from Edge, Chromium Edge, Chrome and Firefox, and Chrome and Firefox credentials, they are easily migrated with USMT.

The reason you cannot migrate Edge and Chromium Edge credentials directly, is that those credentials are stored in the “Credential Manager” and they’re not supposed to be able to be copied. - If they were, the credential manager wouldn’t be worth much :wink:

To migrate Credentials stored in the “Credential Manager” you basically need to export them, for instance to desktop, logged in as the user. Then move them over with USMT, along with the users data and, import the credentials after logging in as the user.