Roaming profiles
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Currently running situations where we have hundreds of users and the roaming profiles are clogging up the workstations hard drive space. Anyone have any experience with this and what can be done to remediate the issue? Deleteing the profiles on each machine is time consuming and just deleteing the folders creates other issues.
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Try Combining roaming profiles with folder redirection.
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Though Group policy you can set this up
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@Jeff-Braasch,
I think @Douglas-Atwood has a good solution for you. There was another type of roaming profile at one time can localized some setting in but I can't remember what that was called right now. -
@Ronnie-Wong are you thinking of Work Folders?
Sorry to necro-post this.
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@Andrew-Despres,
I didn't think of Work Folders. There used to be some type of profile that allow you to keep certain machine profiles, I think, when you logged into a departmental machine...then it would not be same if you logged into another department but make new ones depending that one. But I can't remember what that was called. -
Hey @Jeff-Braasch , great question and I would like to add a few references for you.
Using Folder Redirection and Roaming Profiles
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Folder Redirection
- You can redirect user documents and files to a centralized location through Folder Redirection and as Doug mentioned this can be controlled through Group Policy. The GPO settings can be found here:
YourGPO\User Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Folder Redirection
- This will give you the ability to control what user folders are redirected to your storage server, such as the Documents folder but not the Music and Pictures folder. You can also implement Offline Files for bandwidth optimization and availability.
- You can redirect user documents and files to a centralized location through Folder Redirection and as Doug mentioned this can be controlled through Group Policy. The GPO settings can be found here:
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Roaming Profiles
- You can then designate a Primary Computer for your users in Active Directory. This will allow you to control which workstations a user’s profile will “roam” to. When a Primary Computer is designated, this will be the only workstation that this user’s profile with be downloaded to.
- You can also create and deploy Mandatory Profiles, giving the administrator the ability to create a profile with predefined settings that are deployed to the workstation, with any changes by the user being discarded after logoff. This is done through an editing of the file extension on the NTuser.dat registry hive.
This is not an exhaustive list but may be of some use. I have included some reference links that may help
Folder Redirection, Offline Files, and Roaming User Profiles overview | Microsoft Learn
Mandatory User Profiles (Windows) | Microsoft Learn
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