When creating the migration store, you can use ScanState to store it locally or remotely. Locally means you're storing the migration store on a removable USB drive or on an internal drive for a side-by-side migration. Remotely means you're storing the migration data in a shared folder on a server in your network.
Storing data on a network share can be very convenient, but it can also result in a significantly slower migration process. A migration store can hold a large amount of data. With the size of files and the abundance of hard drive space, it would be easy for a user to accumulate 10 GB of data or more. If you're saving this to a network share over a 10Mbps or even a 100Mbps network connection, you'll be waiting awhile.
Not only will you be waiting, but users on the network may also find themselves waiting longer than normal. You should consider how storing the data on network shares affects the rest of the network. If the network is already busy and you begin moving gigabytes of storage over it, things may slow to a crawl and users will start complaining. If your network infrastructure is reliably running with GB network interface cards, routers, and switches, you will probably be able to use network storage without any problem.
The amount of data included in a migration store can be considerable and, depending on the user's job responsibilities, the data can be sensitive. Any migration stores with sensitive data should be protected until they are used to restore the user's files and settings. They should be destroyed after the user's files and settings have been restored. Sensitive data contained in the migration store could include the following:
At the very least, migration stores should be treated with the same level of protection as the original data. If a user has secret data on her system, the migration store obtained from this system should be treated with the same level of protection used to protect the source data.
This becomes especially important when storing the data on external USB drives. Because these drives are highly portable, it's possible for an administrator to migrate secret data to an external USB drive and then use this migration store to restore the files and settings on a new computer. If the administrator stops there, the USB drive will still hold the secret data. If an educated user later comes across this USB drive and sees the migration store, he could run the LoadState command and restore all the data to his computer. Destruction of the migration store can take several different forms depending on the type of data used. Some programs will erase the data and overwrite random patterns of 1s and 0s to ensure there isn't any data remaining on the drive that can be recovered.
Once you've identified what strategy you'll use to migrate the user's data (in-place migration, wipe-and-load migration, or side-by-side migration), you should do some testing. Except for the wipe-and-load migration, you'll have the original data that can be used to try to save the migration data over and over again. The in-place migration retains the original files and settings in the Windows.old folder, so if you're not happy with the results of either ScanState or LoadState, you can simply rerun the commands. Similarly, as long as you keep the original computer in a side-by-side migration, you can rerun both of the commands. However, you have only one chance to run ScanState with a wipe-and-load migration. After testing and determining the best method, it's worth your time to document the procedure in a batch file that can easily be run without your having to struggle to remember the exact commands and the specific switches.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Shawn C. Paxton at 09132010
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