Folder Redirection in Group Policy allows a systems administrator to redirect certain folders from a user’s profile to a file server. In part 3 of this series, I’ll discuss the folder permissions we set on the file server along with justifications for those settings and alternatives.

At this point, you may have noticed that we didn’t give our users very many permissions on the Users folder. First and foremost, we made sure that one user can’t see inside of another user’s folder. It’s also pretty obvious that we don’t want to give users the ability to do things like take ownership, delete files/folders, or change permissions, but a few of the other missing permissions take a little more explanation.

First off, you don’t want users to have Create files/write data permissions or they can save files into the root of the shared folder. Since we’re redirecting folders, we only want the users to be able to create folders in the root Users folder, but not individual files. Once the user creates a folder named %username%, the CREATOR OWNER permission will take over (since it is a sub-folder of Users) and will give the account full control over the %username% folder and everything inside of it.

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Folder Redirection in Group Policy allows a systems administrator to redirect certain folders from a user’s profile to a file server. In part 1 of this series, I’ll introduce Folder Redirection and show where to find it in the Group Policy Management Console

If you’re like me, you’ve probably gotten a frantic call from a customer because they have a computer that won’t boot and they have irreplaceable files on their local hard drive. Try adding clicking or grinding sounds coming from that computer along with no recent backup to the mixture. Sound familiar? That combination can add up to a very upset customer and possibly a very expensive bill if you have to get data restored from that failed hard drive.

The good news is that there is something you can start doing today to start combatting that problem: Folder Redirection in Group Policy. To get started with Folder Redirection, you’ll need to be running Active Directory (any functional level), have an available file server, and a management station running the Group Policy Management Console. As with most Group Policy, the latest version of the GPMC is preferred, but most of these settings are available in older versions.

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One of the reasons a user may experience a slow logon are problems with a large roaming user profile. This post explains how to troubleshoot slow logon in Active Directory domain in those cases.

I recently spent some time troubleshooting slow logons. I had several complaints and had also personally witnessed some very slow logons. After some investigation, I found that nearly all of the user’s had either a very large profile or had directories with extremely high file count. Rather than just delete and hope the problem didn’t happen again, I decided to seek out a solution that would prevent this from happening in the future.

As you may know, just before discovering a solution, there’s usually a key discovery that lowers your blood pressure and allows your confidence level to return to normal. For me, that moment was discovering the power of using the Exclude directories in roaming profile and Limit Profile size Group Policy settings together.

Exclude directories in roaming profile and limit profile size

The Group Policy Object (GPO) setting Exclude directories in roaming profile is one of those settings that is unusually self explanatory. It allows you to create a list of directories, from the root of the user roaming profile location, that should be excluded from roaming profile synchronization.

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UserProfilesView is a free portable and scriptable tool that enables you to view all local and roaming user profiles on a Windows machine.

You can view all user profiles on a Windows computer either by navigating to the user profiles folder (C:\users on Windows 7 and Vista, and C:\Documents and Settings on Windows XP) or in the Control Panel (System, System and Security, System, Advanced System Settings). With NirSoft’s UserProfilesView, you will probably be quicker because you just have to double-click the tool.

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When I compiled my complete Windows 7 feature overview a while back, one of the features that caught my attention was the background upload of roaming user profiles. This Windows 7 feature overview was mostly based on Microsoft’s Windows 7 reviewer’s guide of the beta version. This guide is no longer available at Microsoft Download, but you still can get it at rapidshare. Note that not everything in this paper applies to Windows 7 RTM.

This is the original text in the Windows 7 reviewer’s guide:

Windows 7 makes Roaming User Profiles more useful and reliable by enabling IT professionals to automatically synchronize users’ profiles with the server while users are still logged on. Prior to Windows 7, this synchronization occurred only when users logged off. With this improvement, users can roam from one PC to another while remaining logged in to both PCs—and still have the same consistent environment.

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The February issue of WindowsITPro has an interesting article about Group Policy annoyances (subscribers only). I think the most common problem is Group Policy settings not taking effect immediately. You change a setting and reboot the machine, but the change doesn’t seem to show immediately.

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If you are working with roaming user profiles (server based user profiles) in your organisation, then be prepared for big changes. Windows Vista and Windows XP user profiles are not compatible! However, you can use folder redirection to make XP and Vista roaming user profiles interoperable. Even if you are only working with local user profiles, I recommend reading on.

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Do you know the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service? It can help solve your problems with roaming user profiles, and if your Windows shuts down very slow. Sometimes, applications maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. The User Profile Hive Cleanup Service monitors if logged-off users have registry hives still loaded and releases them if necessary.

When we recently rolled out about 250 computers, three users had problems with their roaming profiles. Those users didn’t find the last version of their profile on their new computer because their profile was not updated anymore on the server. Every year or so, I encounter the same problem with my own profile. Usually I don’t realize that the synchronization failed because I got no error messages. We only backup user data from the file server. That’s why this is really annoying since I only realize weeks after, that my data was not backed up anymore.

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