Q. What is hard linking migration in User State Migration Toolkit (USMT) 4?

A. Microsoft has released an updated version of USMT that provides the features to migrate user data and state between OS instances. When migrating the information from one OS instance to another on the same machine, which is the case when a fresh OS is reinstalled on the machine, all the user state and data has to be copied to an alternate location then copied back to the machine once the new OS has been deployed.

USMT 4 introduces the hard-link migration store, which allows the user state and data to be stored locally on the computer instead of requiring storage external to the computer, and can therefore potentially save a lot of time. You use the /hardlink switch to use the hard-link migration store, and you also need to use the /nocompress option.

The hard-link migration can be used with Windows XP through Windows 7.

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