User area organisation

[TechMonkey]

Can anyone think of good reasons not to have all students in one folder for their user areas? I know it will be a mass of 650 folders but I can't think of any reason off the top of my head that would need them divided up.

 

Bit of background, we have a pre-school that then feeds into 2 different schools on site so the benefit to one heap of folders would be we wouldn't have to juggle areas around after the move between schools. Obviously they would be organised in AD.

 

Part of me just feels it would be wrong but I can't find a reason why!

 

Ta

[AJWhite1970]

Potentially your AV client might slow things down trying to preempt the scanning of 650 folders off a root folder?

 

#completeguess

[ADMaster]

To delete the leaving year groups folders without sifting through 650 folders to find the correct ones.

[pete]

Off the top of my head......

 

You'd have to be more cautious when scripting and look at the foldername to determine whether that was a student you need, as opposed to splitting shares by yeargroup.

 

On the other hand, having a universal "homedir = \\server\share\%username%" (or \domain\dfsroot\share\%username%) would make config files and other scripts easier to maintain.

 

If you were migrating a server via DFS-R, you couldn't push a yeargroup over at a time and you may run into "hey I'm doing reasonably heavy replication in the working day" issues. That's mostly a case of ensuring you throttle appropriately when people are using stuff.

 

Being able to quickly assess "OK, Y7s are using this much, Y8 are using...." for capacity planning would take longer, but it's infrequent.

 

Quotas can be set on a "who owns that file?" basis, so that's not really an issue.

 

I'd test that it doesn't impact performance for file access/restore and ACL enumeration/modification. How many files and folders are we talking about?

[TechMonkey]

Thanks all. I knew there were reasons just couldn't put my finger on them. Leavers is the bigun but per year scripting and replication are good as well.

[sted]

you could start your usernames with a number denoting tear of entry/exit then all year x would be together even if its in 1 big folder