USMT can perform offline migration of user state from a computer. In an offline migration, the capture is performed in Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) instead of the existing operating system. The advantages of performing an offline user state migration are as follows:

·     You do not need to log on to the computer on which you are capturing user state.

·     Hardware resources and files are more readily accessible by ScanState and other USMT tools.

·     May increase performance on older computers that have limited hardware resources and numerous software applications.

·     Doing so helps avoid conflicts where a file is in use by another application or service.

·     You may be able to use an offline migration to recover files and settings if a computer no longer starts properly.

MDT supports USMT offline user state migration using the Offline User State Capture task sequence step, which is included in the appropriate MDT task sequence templates. The Offline User State Capture task sequence step runs the ZTIUserState.wsf script, which is responsible for capturing the user state using USMT.

For more information, see the following sections in the MDT document Using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit:

·     Saving and Restoring User State Information

·     Configure USMT Offline User State Migration

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