Folder redirection (desktop)

[hedman]

Hi,

does applying this to a machine via GP delete the contents of the desktop on the machine which were saving locally?

 

thanks

[Rob_D]

No. The original desktop icons will still be in the same place (either the "All users" or currently logged on users desktop folders can still have stuff in them). Nothing will be deleted.

 

Unless you have the "Suppress the All User desktop and start menu" option checked windows should show the icons saved in both "all users" desktop folder and your redirect. The original "c:\users\username\desktop" folder will just be ignored.

 

As to whether applying this policy to the PC instead of the user will actually work, I don't know. We've always done folder redirects with the user polices.

[hedman]

thanks, so applied as a user policy, but now seems files folders on those desktops have disappeared, which is strange.

[Rob_D]

Where are you redirecting the desktop to? Sounds obvious but if you redirect to an empty folder then you won't see anything on the desktop as the folder doesn't have anything to put on.

All your doing is changing the file path the computer uses for the desktop.

[hedman]

rob, fixed it, many thanks for your help, files still there in users original location. If the move files to new location option is ticked on folder redirection would it have copied these over?

[DavR]

As I think you've just found, the key point is making sure the "Move the contents of Desktop to the new location" option is ticked.

 

I've retrospectively added desktop redirection to quite a few networks in the past, and as long as this is ticked, and the new redirected desktop folder is writable by the user, files stored on the desktop have copied over just fine.

 

My preferred method is to disable saving on the desktop completely, but that's not always popular!