PC Data migration

Very good indeed. Anyone would think you have some experience of this sort of thing! I have a couple of points to add:

Microsoft are adding something to the Windows backup tool to make W10->W11 migration easier:

For the average home user, with all their files in obvious places, and using OneDrive, do they need to do more than log into their Microsoft Windows account on their brand new W11 machine? I think all their files and settings will be transferred from the cloud.

Neither of those options will transfer non-Microsoft applications, though. Interestingly (possibly!) I use Office 2003 on my W10 machine, but I didn't bother to reinstall it as the free online version of office is perfectly good enough for my needs.

Getting a new PC is an opportunity spring clean and throw out a load of crap. So, just transferring 'everything' is not necessarily the best course of action.

By far the best course is not to do any of the things in the wiki, but instead install everything you need on the new PC from the backups. :D

Rather too much - there is only so much setting up new machines and migrating files you can do before it gets tedious!

That could be good. One of the things that you can do well on other platforms has not historically had an equivalent on windows. On Macs you can usually plug one into the other with a thunderbolt capable USB cable and migrate stuff at quite a decent rate (well above gig ethernet), and much of it just works.

If you already sign into a MS account on the old pc, and have onedrive setup to mirror all data, then yup that will take care of basic files easily (although perhaps slowly).

Files yes - not sure about settings - I think it depends on the app and where the settings are stored.

You could always run it inside a VM though.

For lots of general office stuff the online office suits are quite decent.

True. Although migrating a win 10 install and then "upgrading" does in effect do a new install - but keeps some of the crap!

If you have em :-)

Brilliant, couple of thoughts:

Sharing folders

net share Source="C:\Users\TargetUser" /grant:Support,FULL

icacls "C:\Users\TargetUser" /grant Support:(OI)(CI)F /T /C

The "net share" command will share the users folder on the the network. Replace "TargetUser" with the name of the user folder, e.g, C:\Users\John.

Perhaps should be: Replace "TargetUser" with the name of the user e.g. John

Is it worth including the Windows GUI method of right clicking on a drive or folder, selecting "Properties" then the "Sharing" tab?

Is it worth mentioning adding "Take Ownership" to the File Explorer context menu?

I think mentioning "Clonezilla" to Windows users may earn you a special place in hell :-)

Generally that would be true, however if you ever change the name of a user, the name changes at the login page, but the profile folder name is not updated. So there can be times where the user name will not match the name of the folder.

You could do - but I tend to find the command line version is significantly quicker, especially if you have to mess about in the gui adding permissions for additional users.

(if you are just working on a personal lan and don't care about exposing data to other users, you could just grant "Everyone" full read access)

It would be tempting to just enable guest access, but modern versions of win11 now block access to shares without security on them[1]

Probably ought to do some screen grabs if describing the GUI approach...

I have not found the need as yet. All the main user folders are owned by the user or can be set by an admin account. The only ones that tend to fail are some of the app specific sub folders in the %AppData% and %LocalAppData% sections of the profile.

My favoured one is actually an old bootable USB stick With Acronis on it. Usually fast and reliable, and can copy with changing partition sizes on the fly as well as translating to GPT from MBR.

You can override the policy with (powershell):

Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableInsecureGuestLogons $true -Force

or CMD:

powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableInsecureGuestLogons $true -Force"

I was just concerned that people might try and replace "TargetUser" with "C:\Users\John" rather than just "John".

And mine, especially since I have discovered that Ventoy will boot into legacy mode on the right machine :-)

Ah, you I see what you mean... ok see if that looks better now.

Not played with Ventoy - looks like it could be handy (and mean I can tote about fewer USB thumb drives!)

Ventoy.... JFDI!

You will not look back.....

I now have a 1 TB NVME M2 drive in a USB-C enclosure with around 100 ISOs on it...... No need for a CD/DVD or USB stick PER ISO. I've got exotic ISOs like UBCD, BlissOS, FreeBSD, various flavours of Linux, Truenas, Xigmanas, Rockstor, OpenMediaVault, ProxMox, windows 11 etc

Not only that when a new ISO comes out I can just simply put it on the NVME drive to replace the older ISO. (You can if you wish retain the older ISO for roll back purposes disk space permitting)

Booting a LiveCD ISO or installing an OS is blazingly faster than a USB stick thats been RUFUSed/UNetBootIned or a CD/DVD.

Hi SH :

-)

Hi JG :-)

P.S. To others following the thread:

its really easy to use, once you have installed Ventoy on a NVME / SSD, you can just download whatever ISO's you need and simply copy them across to your ventoy stick. No messing about with UNetBootIn, RUFUS, ISOburner, ISOBuster etc.

And If I recall correctly, it can also handle VHDX, VHD, IMG, WIM and EFI files. So its also useful for anyone who works with Hypervisors.

You can also set up Persistence if that is a preference to a Fresh clean Live booted OS.

And as JG has mentioned it supports both UEFI bios and Legacy bios