Roaming User Profiles, Deletion.

[abillybob]

Hey All

 

Is it a very bad idea to delete all Roaming User Profiles folder on the server? The reason I ask is a lot of people around the school are experiencing really slow login times and it seems to hand on "Waiting for user profile service" so I want to give everyone a fresh clean profile.

 

If it is a bad idea how would I go about doing this to give all users a new profile?

 

Thankyou

[mrbios]

That depends on what is stored in the roaming profile and what you have redirected and what policies are applied to the users in question. Quite a few variables to how you're using your roaming profiles as to how much of an effect it'll have on your users at the other end.

 

Simple answer: not a great idea to just delete them all, and it's only going to happen again, better option may be to find the areas that are causing it to be slow or causing the profile to bloat and maybe redirecting them so they don't need to be re-downloaded by each PC on logon, or move to local or mandatory profiles...(I've never liked roaming much )

[abillybob]

Thankyou!

 

No I know, I'm not liking Roaming profiles since I implemented them, but I suppose you live and learn. When we move over to Windows 10 I will not be using Roaming anymore staff will be on local and students will have a mandatory profile.

The main culprit seems to be their AppData and Downloads folder, how do I re-direct these so they're a lot smaller? Never done this before!

[Meldrew]

Do you actually need roaming profiles? We started with it, but after experiencing slow logon times, decided to just wipe that field in AD for a select group of users to test and didn't have any ill effects, just faster logons, so currently we have no students with roaming profiles only staff, and those we're considering removing it too.

 

Meldrew

[abillybob]

Do you actually need roaming profiles? We started with it, but after experiencing slow logon times, decided to just wipe that field in AD for a select group of users to test and didn't have any ill effects, just faster logons, so currently we have no students with roaming profiles only staff, and those we're considering removing it too.

 

Meldrew

 

To be honest I don't think we do need roaming profiles. Although am I right in thinking that all the laptops will get very full up very quickly with everyone's profile sitting on the local machine?

[mrbios]

Thankyou!

 

No I know, I'm not liking Roaming profiles since I implemented them, but I suppose you live and learn. When we move over to Windows 10 I will not be using Roaming anymore staff will be on local and students will have a mandatory profile.

The main culprit seems to be their AppData and Downloads folder, how do I re-direct these so they're a lot smaller? Never done this before!

 

You can redirect downloads the same way as you do with documents etc. just direct it to their home folders or something using group policy. You can redirect the roaming appdata in the same way, but i have seen certain programs cause a problem with it being redirected so it's best to test it out.

 

I have seen a bug where local appdata has been written back with the profile before too, so make sure that isn't happening to any of your users!

 

To be honest I don't think we do need roaming profiles. Although am I right in thinking that all the laptops will get very full up very quickly with everyone's profile sitting on the local machine?

 

We've moved all our staff on to local profiles and in combination with that we setup some profile cleanup scripts that run on shutdown, PCs shut down every night, nice and clean again when they come on in the morning

Edited December 5, 2014 by mrbios

[abillybob]

You can redirect downloads the same way as you do with documents etc. just direct it to their home folders or something using group policy. You can redirect the roaming appdata in the same way, but i have seen certain programs cause a problem with it being redirected so it's best to test it out.

 

I have seen a bug where local appdata has been written back with the profile before too, so make sure that isn't happening to any of your users!

 

 

 

We've moved all our staff on to local profiles and in combination with that we setup some profile cleanup scripts that run on shutdown, PCs shut down every night, nice and clean again when they come on in the morning

 

Thanks mate!!! You couldn't send me the script you use could you, that could really come in handy! I've just deleted the AD entry to a users roaming profile and will see if it make a difference, if all is well I might just make everyone local profiles and use your script

[mrbios]

Thanks mate!!! You couldn't send me the script you use could you, that could really come in handy! I've just deleted the AD entry to a users roaming profile and will see if it make a difference, if all is well I might just make everyone local profiles and use your script

 

Checkout the post from RobD in this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/scripts/144339-vbs-script-delete-windows-7-user-profiles-when-pcs-restarts.html

 

Direct link to his post: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/scripts/144339-vbs-script-delete-windows-7-user-profiles-when-pcs-restarts.html#post1237587

 

i think that's the most preferably solution, but there's also a post from me in there containing both a vbs and bat solution. The vbs solution doesn't seem to work properly though as it takes forever to run, i currently still use the bat method but really need to get around to testing the method that RobD mentions as i think it's a much cleaner way of doing things

[witch]

I redirect everything and often delete the roaming profiles as I have an ongoing problem with it that I can't work out why.

Never had an issue with it particularly

[Ephelyon]

There's also this computer GPO setting for workstations/servers: Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles > Delete cached copies of roaming profiles.

[abillybob]

Thank you everyone. Think I know what I'm going to do now will keep this thread updated on how it goes!!