Planning your migration carefully can ensure that your migration proceeds smoothly and it decreases any risk of migration failure.

In migration planning, both organizations and individuals should first identify what to migrate, including user settings, applications and application settings, and personal data files and folders. Identifying the applications to be migrated is especially important to avoid capturing data about applications that are expected to be phased out.

One of the most important requirements for migrating settings and data is restoring only that information that is required by the destination computer. Even if the data captured on the source computer is more comprehensive than the restore for backup purposes, restoring data or settings for applications that will not be installed on the destination system is redundant and can introduce instability in a newly deployed computer.

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