What tool? (Moving /user/documents/ to /otherdrive/user/documents)

Frapple · 17 Feb 2011 at 09:58

Morning all!

Basically I threw up a Server2008 RemoteApps server about a year ago when we had 7 people sharing a bonded 3G connection (speedy!) Due to my haste there's a lot of things I can't retro-actively fix so while I build a new one in R2, I need to move the contents of all the users documents folders to another drive, segregated by user name.

What would you use to loop through all the user folders? Robocopy? Powershell?

SiriusB · 17 Feb 2011 at 11:13

I am not sure what the issue is... if the folder structure is already correct - for example

C:\Users\<username>\documents

A simple copy/paste to the new location would preserve the folder structure. Though using Robocopy may be preferable as it will handle retrying files better than the GUI.

Unless of course i am missing something!

Frapple · 17 Feb 2011 at 11:48

I could do that, but it might take a while - there's around 150 different users. The RemoteApps server was such a good idea all remote workers are now using it.

Basically the problem is the hard drive is filling up with people temporarily saving documents before they can be saved into our document management system.

Thinking about could I just not use quotas? What happens when you enforce a quota when some users have already breached it?

DustyMiller · 17 Feb 2011 at 17:04

Folder rediretion set by policy is what you need, however if they all log in at once it will kill everything. But this will move everything for you, as long as you setup the folders in the new location ready for the files to be copied to, and set the correct permissions.

SiriusB · 17 Feb 2011 at 17:46

Frapple said:
I could do that, but it might take a while - there's around 150 different users. The RemoteApps server was such a good idea all remote workers are now using it.

Basically the problem is the hard drive is filling up with people temporarily saving documents before they can be saved into our document management system.

Thinking about could I just not use quotas? What happens when you enforce a quota when some users have already breached it?

Any copy operation is going to take the same amount of time regardless of whether you use Robocopy or the GUI. The best time to move the data is overnight or whenever there is no one using the data. I would opt for Robocopy especially if copying over the network, as it is very good at recovering on disconnects or troublesome files.

As for quotas, if someone has already gone past their limit they will be unable to save any further documents until they removed some items.