Local to Roaming Profiles

[joemc]

Hi guys,

I had some really helpful information in my last topic, so I though I would post again to see if OC could help me again!

Basically what I'm looking to do is swap people from Local Profiles to Roaming Profiles.

We have our users Remote Desktop to a couple of different servers with Windows Server 2008/2003/2008r2 installed on them. Now, we don't want the profiles to be stored locally on each of these, so this is why we are wanting to swap to roaming profiles.

I understand the disadvantages with roaming profiles and logging on, but we have 5 different starting times, so we can cope.

Also, they use Thin Clients which only have a very small hard-drive, which are Auto Logon (not to their Domain profile).

If anyone could provide some information in to moving these profiles over to be roaming profiles without any data being loss, I would be forever grateful!

Thanks

 

[Deleted member 77746]

How many workstations we talking about here? Be careful with this one if you don't want to loose data you should take a copy of the local profile and only test it on one workstation first.

You need to add the server path in the profile settings of the user to allow this. Depending on how many workstations you have then it might be easier to create the roaming profile and put the data from the local profile onto the server in that path of the user of the roaming profile.

You are not really meant to have data in roaming profiles (docs, music, e.t.c) These can be done via desktop redirection/my documents redirection e.t.c.

 

[joemc]

How many workstations we talking about here? Be careful with this one if you don't want to loose data you should take a copy of the local profile and only test it on one workstation first.

You need to add the server path in the profile settings of the user to allow this. Depending on how many workstations you have then it might be easier to create the roaming profile and put the data from the local profile onto the server in that path of the user of the roaming profile.

You are not really meant to have data in roaming profiles (docs, music, e.t.c) These can be done via desktop redirection/my documents redirection e.t.c.

Thanks for the reply.

We have around 90-100 Thin Clients (no data is stored on these). Probably 10-20 users with Laptops which we don't mind their data being downloaded to.

So, would you say,

Add Profile Path in to Active Directory Profile
Get user to Log off and Log back on for the redirection
Move Local profile to Roaming Profile on the server

Would you say that sounds about right? That is what I was thinking of doing anyway.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

1) Log in as local admin.
Backup local profile first.
Reboot machine.
Add Profile Path in to Active Directory Profile.
Move Local profile to Roaming Profile on the server.
6) Use a test user first before using live users.

Then repeat from step 1 on one live user only first.

What you are best doing is making a test account before you really play with users accounts as you say if data loss is important.

Just adding a roaming profile may cause other headaches too as you may have to exclude certain data from been 'syncd'. I can't remember the group policy object info but just be careful.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I would recommend setting up my documents folder redirection to a network location. Then enabling roaming profiles.

When the user logs in setup a script to run once that copies the contents of the my documents folders to the network location of their my documents redirect.

Use the %username% in the script as well as %userprofile% etc.

I would personally not recommend using roaming profiles on servers unless you have to. Roaming profiles is realy designed for clients not servers. If you want to use roamign profiles through remote desktop you have to use the TS roaming profile group policy option. Often if you use folder redirection for the my documents and desktop, the profiles are very small and it improves speed logging and out.

 

[joemc]

I would recommend setting up my documents folder redirection to a network location. Then enabling roaming profiles.

When the user logs in setup a script to run once that copies the contents of the my documents folders to the network location of their my documents redirect.

Use the %username% in the script as well as %userprofile% etc.

I would personally not recommend using roaming profiles on servers unless you have to. Roaming profiles is realy designed for clients not servers. If you want to use roamign profiles through remote desktop you have to use the TS roaming profile group policy option. Often if you use folder redirection for the my documents and desktop, the profiles are very small and it improves speed logging and out.

I think we do have Redirection set up. All of the TS Profiles are stored in one place anyway. Just I don't think the Group Policy was set up, so if you forget to add the Redirection in to their Active Directory profile it's not doing it?