"You should be able to do the migrations faster..."

Early on in my career, I ended up managing a pretty major project in our department of over 100 users. We were upgrading everyone from Windows 3.1 to Windows for Workgroup 3.11, on new hardware.

I was averaging about 3-4 user migrations per day, but for some reason, my boss felt that was slow.

Here's the high-level process that was used for migrating the users:

1. Build out a new desktop for a user 2. Backup the data from current machine, then apply it to new one (across the network) 3. Coordinate with each user on a time where they could be free for at least 90 minutes. 4. Start the migration process with a final backup of their data to the network 5. Swap out their old computer with the new one, and do one last XCOPY from their backup repository to the new computer

Steps 1 and 2 were being conducted at my leisure, but I needed an uninterrupted block of 75-90 minutes per user to complete steps 4 and 5 for them. I basically blocked out 2 hours per user to account for getting over to their area with the new machine, any little overhead in the process, and buffer time to handle any other responsibilities that might come up.

All of this was happening in a regular 8-hour business day. Occasionally, I could manage 5 migrations in a day, by migrating two users in the same area at the same time -- but mostly I tried not to take out whole teams at once.

For whatever reason, my boss was sure that they could be done faster. *"I can't see why it takes more than an hour to complete a migration!"* he said. Repeatedly. No matter how I outlined the process to him, he kept up the second guessing. He continued the passive aggressive nagging for about 3 weeks into the project, when I was just about half way through the migrations.

One Monday, he suffered hardware failure on his primary desktop, and decided that this was a good time to upgrade to his new machine -- and that he would do it himself. He sort of spun this as me not having to stop the migrations to deal with him, but I also suspect that he relished the opportunity to prove that it could be done faster. Okay, worked for me...

Now, in fairness, he and I were already running a different configuration from everyone else in the department. At the time, he and I were running Windows NT 3.51, and our two machines were being backed up to tape along side the critical servers in our department. This is very pertinent to the saga.

On his first attempt at installing Windows NT 3.51 on his desktop, he ran into a couple of snags which consumed considerable time, and which I helped him with in between staff migrations.

1. He had trouble with getting the drivers for our non-native SCSI controllers recognized, so we had to get those drivers and put them on the floppy 2. Even though I had told him to make a temp install to a different folder, so that he could restore his whole OS from tape, he *forgot* that (perhaps with all the hoopla of the floppy drivers), and ended up doing a regular install -- which then could not overwrite key files for itself from the tape drive data.

Thus, he lost all of Monday with the hardware failure itself, plus getting to the place of deciding to do the build, and then learning about the need for the floppy. *(Issue #1)*

Tuesday was consumed with doing the install to the wrong folder, running into the initial issues with trying to restore, and starting a new clean install. IIRC, late on Tuesday evening, the tape restore was kicked off to restore that data back over the machine. *(Issue #2)*

Now, we were using a nice backup solution that was prioritized for backup performance -- not restore performance. A full backup over the network took about 4 or 5 hours, IIRC. The restore, however, took \~20 hours. 😂😂😂

So, there goes Wednesday, pretty much. Late afternoon on Wednesday, he rebooted to find that a few configurations from the apps were stored different in the backups that he expected. It was mostly fine, but he went home, preparing for more tweaking on Thursday.

I also got a lot of questions from him about what exactly was part of the backup process, and where exactly did each app store its files. By Thursday evening, he was good.

Meanwhile, I averaged about 3 migrations per day that week, because ... well... I had to start checking in on him more each day. On Friday, just before departure time, when he asked how many migrations I had done that week, the number was 17. He made no comment this time. 😁

Thankfully, even though his experience with his personal restore was actually more complex that the migrations I was doing, it seems like he accepted the fact that things were not as simple as they had imagined they would be. And he was grateful for my assistance.

And never again did he question me about migrating *only* 3-4 users per day, or why each migration took so long. 🤣

I completed the project about 4 weeks later *(we had some stragglers near the end, as you might expect with a long project, where all the cooperative folks go early)*.

Once or twice a year, I remember this project, and I can't help but laugh each time...

**TL;DR -** Boss thought I should be able to migrate more systems per day; but he ended up taking almost a week to recover from a hardware failure on one system himself.