Hi, we are intending to roll out windows 7 (replacing windows xp)to approx 2,000 pc's across four sites via SCCM. What disaster recovery options are available (if any) if a client pc fails, can we roll back to Xp?. We are extremely worried about losing the users data. Another issue we have is that the .pst files are stored locally on a users pc (we changed from Groupwise to Outlook but it was done manuallly) but not nessecarily in the document and settings folder and we need to move these files. Is there any way of doing this without having to visit every single pc? Thanks Darren

Hello - Windows 7 migration is very huge topic and we very very deep planning and migration. SCCM disaster recovery is nothing to do with Windows 7 migration. From your perspective SCCM Disaster is rolling back from Win7 to windows XP and I don't think we can very easly achieve with USER DATA. If migrating from XP to 7 use USMT 4 to migrate the data. Some details below. http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1633-sample-xp-to-windows-7-task-sequences/Anoop C Nair

I concur with Anoop. One side point though, if you are so worried about user's data, then why are letting them store it locally? That is a complete contradiction and until you resolve that contradiction, ConfigMgr or USMT is not going to be able to magically solve it for you.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/default.aspx | Twitter @JasonSandys

Hi jason, The users are storing their data locally as we have only recently moved from Novell to Active directory and there used to be issues with storage space and reliability of both the servers and network. On many past occasions either the file server died and it took a long time to rebuild and restore the data or the network had issues. Thankfully we have moved to a datacentre so its now someone elses problem, but we have been left with a legacy of people not trusting the network and therefore saving all their files locally.

If you're scared of losing your PSTs then configure USMT to look for them on the old computer and migrate them to the new computer. And while you're at it, configure the destination path as a new standardized/fixed location for PST files. You can communicate this new location to your end users and/or you can enforce it using a GPO. In case you're migrating your users to new hardware I suggest you take an image backup of the old laptop so you can always revert to it in case something is missing. Good luck !

I suggest that you do a full wim backup of every computer during the migration. This way if there is a failure or a file gets missed you will have it. Leave the wim on the machines from which it's generated and put imagex on every machine. If a user calls the support center missing a file it can be quickly retrived. This will make your migration much slower but you will have the peace of mind knowing there's no way anything can be lost. John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum/|