Q. I'm using the User State Migration Tool (USMT) and have specified to ignore certain users and users over a certain age, but my excluded users profile and data is still being backed up. Why?

A. You have several options with the USMT utility for handling user data on a machine. You can exclude certain users using the /ue: switch, and exclude protection of profiles that haven't been logged onto for a period of time using /uel:.

 If you specify both options, such as with

 SCANSTATE /ue:*administrator /uel:60

 you might expect the Administrator profile and any account not logged into in 60 days to be excluded. But what you'll see is that only accounts not logged into for 60 days are ignored, while Administrator would still be backed up. This is because the /uel parameter takes precedence over /ue, so if the administrator account has been used in the last 60 days it will still be backed up.

 The solution is to delete the older profiles before running Scanstate.ese and then use only the /ue switch.

 For Windows XP clients, you can delete old profiles using the Delprof.exe utility, available from Microsoft. You can run Delprof before Scanstate, with a command such as

 DELPROF /q /u /d:60

 For Windows Vista and later, you can use Group Policy, under Computer Configuration, Policies, Administrative Templates, System, User Profiles, and set Delete user profiles older than a specified number of days on system restart.

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