Folder redirection with huge My Documents folder

[Eudmin]

I am just now setting up a Windows 2k3 domain (we are currently just using a workgroup) for about 50 users. I have started giving folks domain accounts instead of their old local accounts and have started transferring their profiles to the domain accounts.

I would like for the secretaries to have roaming profiles, but all of them have pretty big My Documents folders (>5Gb) and so I set the My Documents folder up to be redirected instead of roaming using Group Policy.

I did this for one of the secretaries by logging her in with her new domain account and then copied the contents of her old My Documents folder into the new redirected one. It took a very long time to do it (I assume because it had to transfer it all over the network) and then took forever to log her off while it was synchronizing files. Now she goes to log back on and it is taking forever again! I look at the status of the file server and in the "Open Files" list it seems to be going through every single one of her 2500 files, most of which are decent sized image files.

Is this the offline files feature killing the performance? I thought the whole point of redirecting the folder instead of just including it in the roaming profile was to avoid this kind of thing. In the share settings for the profiles share on the server I don't have it configured specifically to do offline files, by the way.

Any advice for how to set this up correctly? I basically followed the whitepaper recommendations that I was able to find at microsoft.com, and am seeing this result.

Also, any suggestions for good references on how to move lots of users profiles from local ones to domain ones? I have not found many books that describe how to do it. The "Copy Profile" function in the profile manager doesn't seem to work because the ntuser.dat file is still for the local account, not the domain one. Should the domain one log in once to make a new ntuser.dat, then save that one, then copy the profile over, then replace the ntuser.dat?

[Marsden]

The speed of the logon is directly related the size of the profile and the speed of the network. Are you using switches or hubs to connect your machines? There are a number of things that you can do to limit the size of the profile:

• Redirect large folders such as My Documents this will reduce the amount of data copied to/from the computer at logon and logoff.

• Exclude large folders from the roaming profile. By default large folders such as Local Settings, Temp and Temporary Internet Files folders do not roam. You can use the "Exclude directories in roaming profile" Group Policy Setting to add new folders to the exclusion list; once included in the policy these folders will not be copied to the local machine at logon, nor copied back to the server at logoff.

• Set the Slow Network timeout appropriately if you're logging on over a slow link. When a slow link is detected, the system uses the locally cached profile, rather than copying the profile from the server.

• Don't save large files inside the user profile.

How can I troubleshoot user profiles?

The first troubleshooting step should be to examine the Application event log on the client computer, and determine the error. If this is a roaming profile, be sure to check for the correct permissions (These can be found in the User Data and Settings White Paper) - one of the most common causes of roaming user profile errors is incorrect permissions on the profile share.

In addition to logging events in the Application Event log, User Profiles can provide a detailed log to aid troubleshooting. To create a detailed log file for user profiles:

• Start regedit and locate the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software \Microsoft \WindowsNT \CurrentVersion \Winlogon

• Create a new value called UserEnvDebugLevel as a REG_DWORD, and set the value to 30002 in hexadecimal format.

• The log file can be found at: %windir%\debug\usermode\userenv.log

Folder redirection is a feature of IntelliMirror that allows users and administrators to redirect the path of a folder to a new location. The new location can be a folder on the local computer or a directory on a network share. Users have the ability to work with documents on a server as if the documents were based on the local drive. For example, you can redirect the My Documents folder, which is usually stored on the computer's local hard disk, to a network location. The documents in the folder are available to the user from any computer on the network. The My Documents folder is the location on the Windows XP or Windows 2000 desktop where the user can save documents and graphic files.

Previously, administrators who wanted to redirect folders to the network had to use logon scripts to change registry values. In Windows XP, the same task can be accomplished by using Group Policy.

Why would I want to redirect Folders?

Folder redirection provides a number of advantages.

• Improved Roaming User Profile performance. Because only some of their documents are copied, performance is improved when the users' profiles are copied from the server. Not all of the data in the user profile is transferred to the desktop each time the user logs on — only the data that user requires.

• Data stored on a shared network server can be backed up as part of routine system administration. This is safer and it requires no action on the part of the user.

• Data specific to a user can be redirected to a different hard disk on the user's local computer from the hard disk holding the operating system files. This protects the user's data if the operating system needs to be reinstalled.

• Even when logging onto different computers, the same documents same available on any computer on the network

• Administrator can use Group Policy to set disk quotas, limiting the amount of space taken up by users' folders.

How do I configure Folder Redirection?

Step-by-Step Guide to User Data and User Settings located at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techi...nt/userdata.asp

See also http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...n/xpusrdat.mspx

[Eudmin]

I had read a lot of these things, and read the whitepapers, but none of them seemed to tell me how to do what I wanted to do. They all just offer the same formulas similar to what you have reposted here.

I think I may have discovered what I did wrong, however, from rereading the whitepapers.

I redirected "My Documents" into the "My Documents" folder that existed on the share for the roaming profiles. Does that make sense?

Say the username is joeuser. I have a share on my server called \\server\profiles that the roaming profiles go in. I had redirected "My Documents" for joeuser to \\server\profiles\joeuser\My Documents.

This means that it is in the same location that the non-redirected profile files would be. Perhaps there is some conflict where the client machine is going through every single file that is in that remote My Documents folder because it is a part of the roaming profile, and only after doing that it decides to redirect it to that location or something.

Is it a rule to have the target of the redirected folder be in a different share from the profile directory? None of the whitepapers came out and said that, but that seems to be the case from the examples.