Windows User Profile Migration with Profwiz

At my new place of employment, we migrate Windows user profiles from one machine to another using the ForensiT Domain Migration User Profile Wizard, or Profwiz for short. This tool works somewhat differently to the Windows Easy Transfer tool, which handles user profile creation and data migration for you, in that Profwiz only configures profiles in-place to work with data copied from another computer. This means that you are free to use whatever format you wish to store the transferred data, versus the Easy Transfer tool, which uses its own proprietary .MIG format, which in the past I have found can become corrupt and unrecoverable over a certain size. Profwiz also does not create the user profile for you, so you need to do that yourself, but once you run Profwiz, everything "just works." An additional plus to Profwiz is that, in order to use the Easy Transfer tool, you must be able to boot and log into the computer, but Profwiz will work as long as the hard drive is readable.

The Profwiz user guide explains in detail the many capabilities of the tool, along with how you can set up a distribution file with many settings pre-entered to save time during the actual migration process. However, if you're just doing a few migrations, it is easy enough to run the tool manually. To perform a user profile migration on Windows with Profwiz, follow these steps:

1. Create a local profile on the new computer with the same username as on the old computer. If the profile on the old computer was a domain account, don't worry, as Profwiz will take care of that.
2. Copy the user's profile data from their old hard drive or a backup location to the profile on the new machine that you just created. Make sure to copy AppData and any other hidden folders as well to make sure that things like browser bookmarks and application configurations are migrated correctly. (Be sure to keep the old hard drive for at least a little while as an additional backup!)
3. Download Profwiz. Note that even though it downloads as an .MSI, it doesn't really install anywhere, and rather just dumps the .EXE in the same directory. You could probably just re-use the same .EXE for future migrations.
4. Run Profwiz: (Screenshots may be found starting on page 29 of the user guide)
1. Select the computer to which you are performing the migration. For most cases, you will probably choose "Local Computer", though it is possible to perform migrations over the network. In this guide, I will focus on local migrations. [Next >]
2. Select the user profile(s) to be migrated. The free Personal edition of Profwiz only allows a single profile to be migrated at a time, but the paid Corporate edition allows you to select several. You will want to select the profile(s) you created and copied data to in the steps above. You may also check the boxes for "Disable Local Accounts" or "Delete Local Accounts" if you wish to remove the local accounts you created after the migration is complete. (This is useful if your environment mandates that only domain accounts be used.) Check the box(es) next to the profile(s) to migrate, and then [Next >].
3. Enter the name of the domain to which the new user profile belongs. If the computer is not already joined to the domain, you can click the "Join Domain" checkbox below the domain box. If the computer will not be joined to a domain, click the drop-down arrow for the box and select the local computer name. (Azure AD accounts are also supported, but are outside the scope of this writing - please refer to page 38 of the user guide for that information.)
4. Below the domain box, enter the name of the account that should be used for the new profile. This will usually be the same as the username you gave the new profile when you created it. If desired, check the box for "Set as default logon" (useful for single-user scenarios), then [Next >].
5. Profwiz will run through several steps to set the appropriate access control list (ACL) settings for the new profile to allow the specified domain user account to access the files and folders contained within, to join the domain, and anything else you specified for it to do. When done, click [Next >].
6. You will be prompted to reboot the computer after Profwiz is finished.

After the computer reboots, you should be able to log in as the migrated user (assuming that you have their credentials), and everything should be as it was on the old computer. Profwiz does not migrate things like printers or applications, so you will still need to install those by hand, but it does greatly simplify the task of moving a user profile from one machine to another.