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The Files And Settings Transfer Wizard helps migrate user settings

By William C. Schmied, TechRepublic on March 7, 2003

Summary

You don't have to lose your users' data and settings when you migrate to Windows XP Professional. The Files And Settings Transfer Wizard can play a big role in making your migration efforts hassle-free.

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Once you’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade your existing desktop clients to Windows XP Professional, you’ll need to have a plan in place to migrate your users’ settings and documents. Of course, if you're using roaming network profiles and network file storage, or if you're choosing to perform an upgrade installation instead of the generally preferable clean installation, then the XP Professional task will be rather simple. For those of you who won't have those options, however, you’ll need to be proactive so that you can fully protect your user’s files and settings.

Luckily, the Files And Settings Transfer Wizard (FSTW) can help. Here’s a close look at what this tool can do for your migration efforts.

Introducing the Files And Settings Transfer Wizard
With the introduction of Windows 2000, Microsoft presented the User State Migration Tool (USMT). The USMT was a powerful innovation at the time, but it was somewhat limited in its usage, in that it could only move user profile settings from Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation SP3 or later to Windows 2000 Professional. If you needed to move a user profile from one Windows 2000 computer to another, for example, you couldn’t do it. In addition, the USMT is entirely command-line based and requires you to configure its operation through several .INI files. The USMT works and is not entirely a bad solution when migrating large numbers of user profiles—but there’s a simpler way.

The Files And Settings Transfer Wizard solves many of the problems associated with the USMT in that it provides a simple GUI front-end to allow the configuration and transfer of both settings and files. If the computers from which you're transferring data have network connectivity, you can place the image file created during the first phase of the transfer process on a network share, making it easily accessible for the second phase of the transfer.

The FSTW can be launched in three different ways, depending on what you prefer and find easier.
  • You can use the Windows XP CD-ROM to launch the FSTW, as shown in Figure A, on the source computer.
  • You can create a Wizard Disk using the FSTW and then use this to start the process on the source computer.
  • You can also launch the FSTW on the Windows XP target computer by clicking Start | Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Files And Settings Transfer Wizard.

Figure A
The FSTW can be easily launched from the Windows XP CD-ROM.


Before I go any further, I want to quickly list what the FSTW can migrate. These items include:
  • Appearance items, such as wallpaper, colors, sounds, and the location of the taskbar
  • Action items, such as the key repeat rate, whether double-clicking a folder opens it in a new window or the same window, and whether you need to double-click or single-click an item to open it
  • Internet-related items, such as the home page URL, favorites or bookmarks, cookies, security settings, dial-up connections, and proxy settings
  • Mail items, such as your signature file, views, mail rules, local mail, and contacts

The following list details some of the settings that can be migrated. Note that only the settings are migrated, not the applications themselves—you will need to install the required applications before attempting to perform the settings migration onto the target computer.
  • Internet Explorer settings
  • Dial-Up connections
  • Phone and modem options
  • Fonts
  • Folder options
  • Taskbar settings
  • Mouse and keyboard settings
  • Regional options
  • Network drives and printers
  • Desktop folder
  • My Documents folder
  • My Pictures folder
  • Favorites folder
  • Cookies folder

Getting started with the FSTW
Before you can actually start using the FSTW, there are a few things you should be aware of to ensure that your migration is as smooth and hassle-free as possible.

Create custom folders first
If you have any custom folder arrangements on the source computer, you'll need to create these before starting the migration process. Let's suppose, for example, that you've created a folder on your users computers called SecDocs, where they keep all documents that are sensitive instead of keeping them in their My Documents folder. If you're migrating files from this location, you'll need to ensure that the location exists on the target computer and that the correct NTFS permissions have been assigned to it.

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