Question about Active Directory

sizeon

What is the point of a Home drive if you can setup folder redirection?

jabney

sizeon wrote: »

What is the point of a Home drive if you can setup folder redirection?

I find it best practice to use home drives as they work almost 100% of the time as ong as you have network connectivity. Folder redirection in theory should work just as well but in my experience it doesn't and has been known to cause issues.

What we normally do is use folder redirection as a GP and redirect the local folders (my docs, pic etc...) to the users H: drive (home drive).

Jabney

JeanM

In many live environments, a user account is created with a "network" drive mapping. This way if let's say a nurse jumps on another computer, her files follow her profile etc.

Plus, a folder on a network share is backed up, and a local share/folder on the desktop profile isn't.

jibbajabba

Roaming Profile vs redirected folders - Spiceworks

distortionjunky wrote:

It doesn't have to be one or the other, you can use both technologies together. It's recommended that if you do use Roaming Profiles that you also use Redirected Folders.

Roaming Profiles maintains a complete copy of the profile on the server and client(s). As the profile gets larger synchronization can be a pain.

Redirected Folders carves out portions of the profile (My Documents, etc.) and saves them on the server. The client is then pointed to that location for those folders. This helps keep the profile synchronization manageable. One thing to note, Redirected Folders can be set to synchronize with the client via Offline Folders.

Here we use Redirected Folders for everyone. Roaming Profiles is applied to desktop users, and Offline Files is used for notebook users to make Redirected Folders available offline.

For the most part this has worked out well. User data has a more complete backup and users can easily transition between PCs. Storage-wise we've found that this is the largest growth area.

Josh

About7Narwhal

I always thought it was a permission issue. Every user has full rights to their Home Drive but that might not be true for folder redirection. A prime example, at my college users are unable to save to local folders (eg: My documents) because that data would be lost. We all must save our work to the network drive with our name.

Additionally, backup and restore or delegation/inheritance tasks would probably be easier as well. Everything valuable would always be in one place for everyone. No more of the "Bob quit and we cannot find X."

Or people are lazy and it is a simple add in AD vs several GPOs.