MankhongGarden

Windows Dev Machine Migration Notes — AI skill for Claude Code

AI community

Notes on an iPhone-style backup/restore for a Windows dev machine run by an AI agent: secrets in Bitwarden, git bundles, Claude Code state.

How to install Windows Dev Machine Migration Notes

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open MankhongGarden/windows-dev-machine-migration-notes and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Windows Dev Machine Migration Notes does

Notes on an iPhone-style backup/restore for a Windows dev machine run by an AI agent: secrets in Bitwarden, git bundles, Claude Code state. Rehearsed, not yet used for a real move.

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README

Windows dev machine migration notes

**Status (2026-10-07): built and rehearsed, but not yet used for a real move.** The weekly backup is running. The restore was rehearsed three times inside a throw-away Windows user on the same laptop. The last rehearsal finished with 0 failed steps. Four parts have never run on real new hardware: partitioning the disk, installing apps, importing registry settings, and registering admin scheduled tasks. This page describes what was built and why. It is not a tested recipe. I will update it after the first real migration.

The goal

I wanted a new PC to come back like an iPhone does: sign in, wait, and everything is where it was.

My laptop is more than a normal Windows setup:

an AI coding agent (Claude Code) does most of the development, with its config, skills, memory and full chat history
about 110 environment variables, most of them API keys and tokens
around 15 git repos that live outside any cloud folder, some with commits that were never pushed
scheduled tasks, tray tools and registry tweaks that keep the machine cool and the C: drive small

Windows' own backup brings back none of that. I am not buying a new PC yet. So the plan became a **permanent weekly backup plus one restore script**. That way the day a laptop dies is just a normal restore, not an emergency.

What it does

Backup (every Sunday, in the background)

**One zip per part, stored on personal OneDrive.** The parts are:
- tools
- Claude Code config and history
- local folders that are not in any cloud
- git
- system state
It keeps the last 4 runs, about 1 GB each. One run takes about 15 minutes. The zips are set to online-only, so they don't take local disk space.
**Git:** `git bundle --all` for every repo outside a cloud folder, plus the uncommitted changes. This captures unpushed work without pushing anything. Some of these repos deploy automatically on push, so pushing from a backup job would be dangerous.
**AI