I was just brushing up on USMT (User state migration toolkit), and it would appear that a new cool version has been released, in conjunction with MDT 2010 (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) it offers USMT using hardlinks.
The point is that data does not need to be backed up to an external USB disk or network drive, it will be stored in a protected area of the harddisk during installation and then afterwards just linked via hardlinks.. This speed’s things up tremendously (normally a USMT could take from 30 min – 1 hour, but here we are talking minutes)..
In this example it was an XP migration to Windows 7, I may also need XP -> XP migration so it will be interesting to see if this is also possible..
See more here;
http://edge.technet.com/Media/User-State-Migration-with-Windows-7/