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Hello Windows Noob community! This community has helped me build our company's production deployment system - so I just want to say thanks for that first! Now I am hoping it come come through for me yet once again... So I have a beautifully working USMT backup task sequence that backs up a full user state to a network share which can then be used during the imaging process to restore the backup to a new PC. It works great! What I am wondering now.... is there a way to use that backup to restore a user state to an already existing imaged PC? Ex: We have a stockpile of 10-12 PCs imaged and ready to go... Joe Shmoe's PC is about to die so we run the USMT backup on it, grab his user state... Is there a way to apply that user state to one of the stored PCs without re-imaging it? I try to just double click the .mig file and use the windows easy transfer wizard but it fails 100% of the time... not sure if it's because of how the imaging process backs up the data? Is it possible to create a task sequence that just asks if you'd like to restore data? Thanks in advance for any assistance! AaronBISSELL

I'm working in a medium-sized company with arond 250 PCs. A few months ago, I set up a vbscript that runs Scanstate silently during log on for the purpose of capturing user profile/Windows settings, i.e., Office settings, Windows profile customizations, network drives, printer connections, ODBC connections, etc. While it's working just fine, and has saved us countless hours when rebuilding a user's PC, the .mig files that get created during scanstate are larger than we would like them to be and has caused space issues on our backup server since the file gets backed up (and we want to back up those .migs!). I've already created an XML file that scanstate calls on which excludes a few file extensions such as Office douments, zip archives, PDFs, audio files; however, I believe there are more files that are being captured that we can do without. I've also already excluded external drives from the capture. For our environment, we don't need Scanstate to capture any more than what is required to capture Windows settings, user profile settings, etc. We have backup software that takes care of backing up data. Any help is appreciated.