so you need to deploy maybe a hundred maybe a thousand new windows 10 machines and you want to carry over all of those user settings documents and application settings hi i'm wes bryant edutainer at itpro tv and in this video i'm going to show you how to use the usmt or the user state migration tool [Music] we've gone ahead and we pulled up the microsoft documentation for what's known as the user state migration tool and it is a tool that allows you to migrate the settings that i mentioned in our intro now one of the things that you want to keep in mind is this documentation is pretty extensive and we're going to keep the links in the description below however i want to kind of demystify some of this and we'll not just show you how to read a document but show you how to actually do this so we're going to um we will keep all of this information available for you too now i do want to say ahead of time if you only have to maybe deploy a couple of computers maybe you're doing this for a very small office maybe 10 computers max well microsoft doesn't recommend the complexities of the user state migration tool because it's for well more than 10 a lot of times hundreds if not thousands of computers because it's it you can script it you can automate it and you make it really easy for large deployments so one of the things in the past that they've said that you could use is something known as the windows easy transfer well this information right here is going to make it a little bit difficult to use the windows easy transfer and that's because it's not in windows 10 anymore however don't fret microsoft does have something for you and that's something known as lap link and this is their pc mover express and we'll put this documentation in here too and one of the things that you can kind of see here is that it does say that it is a free download unless you're using it commercially then you're gonna have to pay a commercial license so if you have to do this just for you know a single computer it's an easy way to do a very quick easy point-and-click wizard type migration but that's not what you're here for so let's go ahead and what do you say we get started now one of the first things that you have to do in your environment is you have to download and install what is known as a portion of the windows assessment and deployment kit or the adk now i'm on my windows 10 machine and let me go ahead and we'll get logged in here real quick and i'll get logged into my account and here on my desktop one of the things you're going to see is that we have acquired the executable for the adk that's the assessment and deployment kit and the usmt or the user state migration tool it's a part of this bundle here so it is going to require an internet connection so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to fire this off just by double clicking this executable here and you're going to see that it starts this wizard now it gives you a default location of where you're going to install this and i do want you to pay attention to this path here notice it's in program files x86 backslash windows kits backslash 10. that is going to be an important area because we actually have to navigate that uh to that location inside of a command prompt when we're going to use the user state migration tool so we'll go ahead and say next to the wizard pay attention to the disk space that it's going to use we're not going to use much because we're not going to download the entire deployment kit all right now the other thing it's going to ask you the next thing is the ciep the customer in uh experience improvement program that's the ceip and you can opt into this i'm going to opt into this just because i'm doing research all the time and i don't mind them collecting the data that might not be something that you can do according to your corporate security policies just pay attention to your organization there and then we're just going to accept the end user license agreement here and you can see we have a whole bunch of tools now one of the first things i'm going to do is uncheck every single one of these and what i like about this is it gives you a small description about what these do but the one that i specifically want here is the user state migration tool you'll see the usmt and it includes a few of these tools it includes something known as scan state load state and some of the background utilities and we're going to talk a little bit more about these coming up and i'll show you uh some of the files that are also associated with this it is a just over a half a gig in size so i'm going to go ahead and choose install now it does require administrative level privileges and i'm in a standard user account so i'm going to go ahead and just elevate real quick elevate those privileges so we can fire off the insta of the installation and what it's going to do is it's going to reach out to microsoft servers and it's going to check it's manifest if you will or catalog and it's going to say okay what was it that you wanted to download in our case we chose just to focus on the usm team i encourage you that if you are currently studying maybe you're a student maybe you're studying for a microsoft exam maybe you're just curious download them all if you've had if you have the drive space the storage space on your machine nothing going to hurt by downloading the extra tools however just keep in mind at this point in time this video is only focused on the usmt which is why we're going ahead and just gonna leave it right there now i'm gonna go ahead and choose close you could open up the getting started guide but that's kind of what i'm here for i'll help you get started with this utility now let me set a scenario up for you all right i've logged in with my user account right let's go ahead and let's create uh let's create a few things first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to open up file explorer and in file explorer i'm going to navigate to my documents folder and what do you say we just go ahead and we create a document and i'll call it secrets and we'll put some information in it here and i'll just put 11 herbs and spices we want to save that that's an important recipe all right we'll choose save so i've got a document here and what we're doing is we're just trying to create a couple of documents so that you can see how this works next thing i'm going to do is just create a bitmap image and i'll say this is my well bitmap because i'm that creative on the fly there and we'll right click and i'm going to choose a one more let's just go ahead and choose a rich text document i'll just call this my rtf file okay nothing big again just for the purposes of getting something in here so you can see exactly what we're doing now on a larger scale you probably have a hundred users thousands of users and they probably have user settings and application settings that are maybe specific to their machine in their environment i realize that in a corporate environment typically documents aren't going to be saved on a local computer they're probably on a file server somewhere but it'll show you the power of the usmt nonetheless so now we've got our documents right we've got the things that we want to save now it's time to use the usmt and there are a couple of things that we're going to use let me go ahead and switch over here i've actually got the the utilities and what their commands kind of look like and i'm going to go ahead and show you what we need to do all right the first utility that we use is what's known as scan state and scan state what it does is it scans the state of the computer imagine that it's named appropriately but it scans the state of the computer and it stands for your user settings it scans for your documentations as well as application specific settings as well and these what it actually saves are denoted by these files there's one called mig app dot xml it's an extensible markup language there's another one called mig docs and that's your document settings the mig app that's your application settings and there's one other one in here and you don't see it on the screen and i just want to go ahead and call it out and that is mig user dot xml and then finally there's this one that you see up here this by the way this first line this is what you're going to get off of the microsoft documentation we'll disseminate this and make it a little bit more meaningful now if i decide that i do not want to include things that are already in these files i can generate a config.xml file now please understand that's going to be generated by scan state but not used by scan state let me say that one more time it's going to be generated the config file by scan state but it's not used by scan state it'll be used by the next utility load state and what load state will do is it'll look at these three xml files and say hey what am i supposed to save but then it'll also look at the config file and say was there anything that wes decided that he didn't want to save let me go ahead and exclude those so that's how you exclude files as well let's go ahead and travel on over to our machine here let's see where these are actually located here i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to open up our file explorer and i'm going to navigate down into local disk c and let me see if i can increase the font just a little bit and make it a little easier to see all right and we're going to go down into the programs x86 file and we're going to go into kits or excuse me i'm sorry windows kits specifically and then from windows kits you're going to see that there is this 10 right this is what we want we want notice it's 10. uh we got to keep in mind that the version usmt works on different versions of windows so pay attention to the windows usmt that is right for your operating system your version of windows then we're going to go into the assessment and deployment kit all right and you'll see in here there is the user state migration tool and then there are different platforms works on amd 64 which is essentially 64-bit machines it also works on arm-based uh 64-bit processors too for mobile deployment as well as x86 so that's your 32-bit that's what these three different folders are here now if i get down into xma or i'm sorry amd 64. our 64-bit architecture you're going to see that here's that mig app file and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to open one of these mig app we're just going to right-click on it we're going to choose open and then let me just make this a little bit larger for us to see and you can see it's basically just a set of xml documentation and if you ever want to figure out what is it that it's actually taking off of the computer what is it migrating you can just follow these little less than symbols with the the exclamation point here notice it says hey we're gonna if you have office word 1630 32-bit these are the settings that we're going to save right so you can see that it just defines what is going to be saved and what is going to be taken off the machine and there's mig app you'll see in here that there's big docs there's the third one that or the second one that i was talking about and then there's mig user here as well so all three of these documents work in combination with each other the one that is not here is the config.xml remember that's going to be generated by scan state if you choose to exclude locations and then you see you have scan state and you have load state these two different applications and these three files uh potentially four if you generate the config file uh they make up the heart of the functionality that you would be interacting with as an i.t tech so let's what do you say we go ahead and we do a little bit of migration the other part of this is you have to have a file store set up like a file server and i've got a windows server here in the background so we'll go ahead and what we're going to do we'll get logged into our windows server and let me make sure it's the right server and what we'll do is we'll set up our file share now um this really isn't an episode on permissions make sure that you set up the permissions and ntfs and share permissions appropriately uh what i'm doing just for this purposes of this show uh is i'm just going to create a new folder we're going to call it mig store all right and then i'm going to right click on it choose properties and i'm going to set the sharing permissions via the advanced sharing um button or if you will in the properties on the sharing tab and i'll share this folder out and we're just going to keep the the share name the same we're going to keep it mig store but then i'm going to make sure that i modify the permissions so that for this purpose everybody has full control and we'll go ahead and choose apply but now we need the local ntfs permissions also to reflect the appropriate level of access that we want to give again in this case what i'm going to do is i'm going to choose edit select users and then i'm going to go ahead and give users the modify option here so that they can actually write this to this folder as you need implement principle least privilege again that's for another episode but this at least gets that store ready to go so that we can use it in order to migrate those settings and when i run the migration tool scan state it's going to load these up these settings into that migration store that we just created so now that that's done we can go over here and we can launch up an administrative command prompt so i'm going to type cmd and i'm going to hit ctrl shift enter because you have to be an administrator and again i'm not logged in as an administrator i'm logged in as a standard user and i just i'm elevating my privileges here in the background now once we've got that done the next thing that we have to do is we have to navigate to uh the the location of the usmt and that's why this next part is going to be they're all important steps but you have to make sure that you're in the right location or your command prompt prompt's going to say i don't know what scan state is uh so let's go ahead and i'm going to use the absolute path uh so we're going to do a cd c colon right change directory c colon backslash and i'm going to use my tab key just to make it easier those of you that have watched some of my shows on itprotv's website probably no i don't type the best program files then we're going to do windows kits backslash 10 backslash for us because we're on a 64-bit machine i'm just going to type in amd oh i'm sorry got ahead of myself assessment and deployment kit you're going to see this is going to get kind of big here backslash user state migration tool there we go and then this is where the architecture comes in when we do amd you'll see amd64 and now we're in that location and if i just do a dir and we'll pipe this out to let's pipe this out to more so it doesn't dump too much out of it out on the screen here you can see lo here here are those at those um executables that we were talking about there's the load state mig app mig docs here and we should see there's scan state coming up as well uh yeah so mig user as well so there you see those three files that we're talking about all right now at this point we're going to run and let me go ahead and just kind of quit out of this and i'll clear our screen we're going to run this command all right now in the documentation it looks like this again let me kind of break this down because this is what i'm going to run all right it says back you're going to put the unc path to the migration store so backslash backslash computer name backslash share name and my in my case the server's name is mbr srv member server for short and then it's so it's backslash backslash my server's name backslash mig store you've seen us create the shared file our shared folder on the file server in order to put the usmt migration files up there i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to use this as an example i'm not migrating any application settings but if i was i would use the forward slash i colon migep.xml file in this case we do want mig docks you can put both of them in and if you don't have application settings it's not going to hurt anything it's just going to say hey if i see settings i'm going to migrate them i'm going to include them in the bundle if they're not there it's not going to hurt anything and then what version that you're using and then finally this is a very important one i would have too that is a log file and it will dump a log file down in the path that we just navigated so that if you run into errors you should be able to just kind of parse through that file and find out what the error code is and then you can always go out to microsoft documentation and you can find out what the answer is so what do you say we're going to go ahead and we're going to run this command right here so let's switch back over to our machine and i'm going to run scan state all right space backslash backslash and we're gonna go ahead and we are going to run our um the the scan state with the migration store and let me go ahead real quick and what i want to do here is on this vm i want to make sure that it is connected uh to our internal network and and that's also always something to make sure you one of the things that you will notice is that uh if you aren't connected to the uh store this isn't gonna run appropriately so that's expected i have a multi-home computer one connected to the internet to download the adk one connected to the internal network that connects back to the file server in this case what you've seen me do i just disabled the external adapter because i don't need that all right now back to scan state we're gonna type scan state space and then the unc pass so in this case it's mbr srv backslash in our migration store i just named it mig store again just because well i'm not too creative on that part then we're going to go ahead and what we're going to do is we're going to put a space in there and we're going to say forward slash what i want to do is i colon and i'm going to do mig app dot xml just to put it in there and show you that this is how you would do the application settings if you wanted to i don't have application settings that i'm going to save but it's it's okay for our demonstration purposes then a space in a forward slash i colon uh and then it's going to be mig doc oh and and you know what what is interesting it is it is mig app not apps mig app but then with the my uh migration of your documents it is mig docs plural so just watch your uh syntax down there i know it's hung me up a couple of times figuring out why didn't it work uh then a space forward slash and the version we're going to do v 13 a v colon 13 space forward slash l for the log and then i'm just going to put i'm going to call it colon scan dot log all right and what we're going to do is after that we're going to go ahead and run this and you'll notice what it says right here it says starting the migration process now if it hangs right here and it doesn't do anything and i've had this happen so just i just want you to be aware it's probably not going to succeed like this is all right you're probably going to get an error and if i remember right i want to say it's air 27 27 to 26 it's one of those two and that typically is an error that says you didn't set the file permissions right on the migration store because usmt what did it do it tried to scrape all these or migrate i call them scrape migrate all these settings off and then it tries to load them up into that migration store the shared folder that we just created if you don't have access or usmt doesn't have access to that shared folder this will error out here's another thing why might the permissions be set wrong if you know the permissions are set right chances are you're not an administrative user and you don't have access to that file share and by association the application and the context that you're running it doesn't have access to it either so it'll fail looks like everything is good what do you say we go ahead and we hop on over to the migration store that we have used all right and what we're going to do here is let's go ahead and let's switch over to our migration store this is on our file server and if we get into that mig store you're going to see that there's a usmt file there now all right notice we have user state migration tool all right that's what we want now that is half of the part half of the uh the process the other process is now you're going to deploy a brand new windows 10 machine oh and by the way this goes all the way back to windows 7. usmt has versions that could scrape windows 7 settings as well you shouldn't be running windows 7 by now but if you are just keep in mind you do have options now the point uh the next thing that we have to do is we have to make it kind of like our windows 10 machine is a brand new machine so in order to do that what i'm going to do is i'm going to shut this command prompt down and i've got a snapshot on this machine that basically will return it to before my user ever logged into this machine at all and there's a reason we're doing this this would be a brand new machine and we've never logged into it right so the first time i log into it what i'm going to do is i'm going to see are my settings there and your end users out there will do the same thing they're going to find out all right where are all my settings where are all my documentation where's my files right and if you've logged into in to it for the first time you're not going to have any of that information and that's where load state comes in so what do you say we go ahead and we will log in but i'm going to log in as myself and one of the things you're going to notice is that when i log in as my cell you should see that it builds my profile again if it doesn't build my profile that means i've already there we go that's what we want to see this is the first time this is what an user sees the first time you deploy a computer right you've probably seen this before if you've been watching before maybe watch some of the it pro tv episodes in our course library when you install a new operating system and you launch it for the first time this is what's known as the oobe it has enough acronyms that's the out of box experience it's essentially saying hey it's still got the new car smell what it doesn't have are your settings doesn't have your documents your user settings your application settings and last but not least it doesn't have any of your documents and that's why we need to use scan state in order to or excuse me load state in order to pull that information back down so let me go ahead and if i open up things like file explorer and i go to my documents folder notice what's not what isn't there i don't have my secret recipe with my lemon herbs and spices there i don't have my bitmap or my rich text document all of that is gone right and that's where we're hoping load state is going to help us out here so what i need to do is i actually need to let me go over to where the 80k uh executable the the assessment and deployment kit was and here's our 80k setup and what we're going to do is we're going to essentially repeat the process that we did when we installed the usmt so same thing nothing has changed here we're just going to next to the wizard if you aren't familiar with what we're doing here uh pause it rewind go back to the first part where we installed 80k on our machine at first i'm going to go ahead uncheck all of these except for the usmt and then what we will do is we will install now again it's asking me for administrative uh administrator level privileges so i need to escalate we'll go ahead and do that and what it's going to do now is it's going to just like we did it first it's going to reach out to microsoft servers and it's going to download the usmt and then we're going to go ahead and what we'll do is we'll run our load state on this machine and we'll connect back to the migration store and pull down those user documents in this case which is what we decided that we were going to migrate plan your migration strategies appropriately this is just a simple demonstration of how to use the tool there's a lot more complexities when it comes to large migrations all right we're going to choose close here and we're going to navigate to that location where the usmt is installed so i'm going to go ahead and i'll type cmd in our instant search field here and we'll do a control shift enter i want to escalate the privileges to an administrative level command prompt remember that's going to be required to use the usmt uh if it fails that's probably going to be one of those reasons it it fails on you uh if you are not an administrator so again with all of my settings being completely reset you'll notice that i'm going back to the beginning here even resetting my command prompt so that you can see what's going on here and what we're going to do is we're going to navigate to that same location it's going to be cd space c colon backslash program files x86 backslash windows kits and backslash 10 backslash assessment and deployment kit backslash user state migration tool backslash amd 64 and we'll hit enter now the last part of this is we're going to run this command the load state command and it's going to reach out to that server and hopefully it's going to pull down those settings so let's go ahead and do that we'll run load state space backslash backslash 10 or excuse me let me use the host name here mbr srv backslash mig store space forward slash i colon mig app dot xml space forward slash i colon mig dox plural dot xml space forward slash v 13 space forward slash l colon scan dot log and just to be sure uh when you have uh sometimes when you have a multi-home computer it uh it might prioritize which network adapter uh is running so i'm going to ensure that our the the network adapter that we're using is the on the internal network here and then what we're going to do is we're going to run this command [Music] all right and what we see here is that it is starting the migration process now pay attention notice where it does say that the logs are being sent and what it's doing is it's reaching out to that migration store and it's actually pulling down any application settings and any documents and not only the documents for my user account but remember we didn't specify and say just do wes brian's account we said do the administrative account do the public account do all the accounts on this machine so also keep that in mind if you have 10 accounts on a single machine it's going to scrape them all and one of the things i would recommend is don't include music and videos remember that this is a business and those documents are more important i know some people might disagree with me but the documents are a lot more important than those videos and again the music uh collection it really could generate a pretty hefty migration process now i'm gonna go ahead and minimize this and i want you to notice something here if i open up my file explorer and go to documents notice what i have i have my bitmap i've got the new rich text document that i just created and if i open up secrets i have my 11 herbs and spices back and ladies and gentlemen that is how you download install use and successfully deploy the user state migration tool if you like the information that you've seen here today be sure to check out all of our windows 10 how-to videos and subscribe to the it pro tv channel thanks for watching