Setup windows xp roaming profiles

This will be something I'll have to consider at a later time. There is a reason Microsoft has been playing with alternatives like virtual disks, and that's because Roaming profiles eventually break due to some screwball printer driver locking the registry or Acrobat driver and create a mess. Think about how many times you've had to delete the local profile of a user to fix a problem. Now spread that profile out along multiple workstations and network connections.

Throw a WAN in the mix and welcome to hell. IMO, desktop folder redirection carries favorites and most of what user's want from work station to workstation. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional. Last Updated: Jul 18, 11 Minute Read. Reply Facebook Twitter Reddit LinkedIn. Tony Villasenor This person is a verified professional.

Main Areas of Contribution:. Track Progress. Earn Credits. Step 2: Identify the Roaming Users. See Figure 3. Step 4: Add our users to the Security Group. Step 6: Associate the roaming users with the computers they will be sharing.

Repeat this process for all designated Roaming Users. In our Server, it was identified as the Volume J: a. Allow caching of share 3. Click NEXT. Step Assign these permissions to our Security Group. Read Permissions 5. Click OK. Step Edit permissions for our Security Group. Step Remove Authenticated Users. Step Select User Folders to be Redirected. Step Edit Settings for Redirected Folder. Step Warning Popup. Step Enable our GPO. Step Repeat this process for all the Roaming Users.

Be sure that all roaming users have their profile path defined. Step Test the process. Step Verify Status of Roaming User. Step Verify Network File Sharing. CrownedClown Jul 11, at pm. This is really informative and helpful! Thanks for sharing! Drew84 Jul 12, at pm. Philip99 Jul 12, at pm. Theborgman77 Jul 12, at pm. Michael Jul 12, at pm. Great write up Tony. So whats the difference between Folder Redirection and Roaming Profiles? TagYourIT Jul 12, at pm. I prefer to avoid Folder Redirection. Casey-SA Jul 12, at pm.

Thai Pepper. MikeMalsom Jul 12, at pm. GastonCardey Jul 12, at pm. Bert Lousteau Jul 12, at pm. If you just blindly enable roaming profiles, you can cause some serious performance and availability problems for your users. Just to make sure that we are all on the same page, I want to start out by talking about what exactly is contained within a user's profile. For example, on the workstation that I am using to write this article, there are folders named Administrator.

Production, Administrator. Stewie, Brien, and All Users. The three hidden folders are used by applications and services to interact with the operating system.

They are beyond the scope of this article, but I wanted to at least mention their existence. OK, so what about the visible folders? The All Users folder contains profile elements that apply to anyone who logs into this machine.

The Brien folder contains the profile for my user account. There are two Administrator folders; Administrator. Production and Administrator. Production is the name of the domain that the workstation is connected to and Stewie is the name of the local machine named after one of the characters on the cartoon Family Guy. Windows treats a local user and a domain user as two completely separate user accounts, even if they have the same name, and therefore maintains completely separate profiles for them.

You will notice that the folder named Brien does not contain an extension. This folder contains a profile for a domain user named Brien, but no extension is necessary because there isn't a local user with the same name. I should also point out that there are certain disaster recovery situations in which you may have to install a fresh copy of Windows.

When this happens, Windows won't overwrite existing profiles, but it won't re-use them either. Instead, Windows will add yet another extension. For example, if the Administrator. Production folder already existed, but Windows had to be reloaded from scratch, then the next time that the Administrator from the Production domain logged on, Windows would create a profile folder named Administrator.

In a situation like this, you could actually restore the user's original profile by copying all of the files from Administrator. Production to Administrator. Now that you know how the naming conventions work for profile folders, let's talk about the folder's contents. Normally, a profile folder contains about a dozen sub-folders and at least three files. Most of the folders are pretty self explanatory. For example, the Cookies folder contains Internet Explorer cookies.

The Application Data folder stores configuration information user specific information related to applications. However, the Local Settings folder also contains its own Application Data folder. Aside from that, the most important folders within a profile folder are My Documents, Desktop, and Start Menu, which store the profile owner's documents, desktop settings, and Start menu configurations respectively.

There are several other folders used by profiles, but they are fairly self explanatory, and you won't have to do anything with these folders as a part of any of the techniques that I will be showing you. As you can see, there are a lot of different components that make up a user profile. Profiles include a user's application data, documents, cookies, desktop, favorites, recently opened document list, network neighborhood list, network printer list, send to option list, and templates.

The reason why I am telling you this is because after you enable roaming profiles, all of these profile components will have to be copied to the network. It wouldn't be so bad if the information only had to be copied once, but usually, everything that I named has to be copied every time that a user logs in or out.

The first time that a user logs on after roaming profiles have been enabled, Windows has to copy the local profile to the designated spot on the network. After that, every time the user logs on, the entire profile is copied from the network server to the user's local hard disk. The user then works off of the local copy of the profile throughout the duration of their session.

When the user logs off, the local profile including any changes that have been made to it is copied to the network. This might not sound so bad, but keep in mind that user's profiles can be huge. Just the My Documents folder alone can easily be several hundred megs in size.

I have personally seen several instances in which a user's profile was so large that it took over an hour for the user to log on or off because so many files had to be copied.

The easiest way to get around this problem is to use folder redirection. The idea behind folder redirection is that you can tell Windows that certain parts of the user's profile should remain on the server rather than being copied each time that the user logs on or off.

This drastically reduces the amount of time that it takes users with large profiles to log on or off. Windows allows you to individually select which folders you want to redirect, but the folders that are most often redirected are My Documents, Application Data, Desktop, and Start Menu.

In a few moments I'll show you how to enable roaming profiles and folder redirections. Before I do though, there are a few caveats that I want to talk about. I've never messed with roaming profiles and the google leads to numerous links that aren't extremely helpful.. That's just from memory quickly I'd have to test it because it has been a while we have had a new user with a roaming profile.

I believe though there is a difference between XP and Vista and newer profiles I guess it would be the same but if I'm right it might create two profile maps for the user , one for the XP , one for the Vista The nice thing about roaming profiles is that you don't HAVE to manually create the folders for each user.

You simply point to where the folder will go and it will auto-create it under Server 2k8 R2. The permissions should all be set automatically. That's how we did it at my old job. Just make sure to tell them that anything in their documents folder will go onto the server including their iTunes library, etc. Just a word of caution but roaming profiles is the way to go. If an XP user logs onto a 7 machine they will get a blank profile because it will be a different path because of the.

If you have roaming profiles that log in at different workstations XP, Vista, Win7 then I'd strongly suggest using GPO's to redirect the contents of the Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc to a standard location for the user. Let's face it - users still store things on their desktop even though it's been declared quite a few times that the desktop is NOT backed up ;.

RE: The folder redirection..