Home Folders disappearing when a pupil logs in

[smithson83]

Hi Everyone,

 

I have a verystrange and annoying issue. Pupil home folder is fine, all present and correct. When the pupils logs in, it disappears... From the server!

 

I restore the folder, check ACLs and it reappears (usually without them having to logoff. I'm not sure if this is just a one time thing, as it seems to be only happening once per user, but we have over 1200 pupil accounts.

 

I have recently descovered that our setup of DFS-R sat in a 2012R2 VM stored on a CSV could be an issue, but i removed the DFSR last week.

 

Any help would be great.

[Michael]

I'd say this issue is most likely DFSR or possibly DNS related.

[sted]

I did have that once a long time ago with a funny mandatory profile cant remember the specifics but that caused their user area to be deleted

[smithson83]

Can anyone suggest a way of preventing it from happening, at the moment, i'm just waiting for the Home folder to disappear when they log in... then quickly rush to restore it before the end of the lesson.

 

but teachers and students are, quite rightly, getting a bit antsy about the whole thing.

[DMcCoy]

Do you have move enabled for folder redirection? Are you changing between dfs/unc/fqdn paths that are actually the same location? There is an issue when if the redirected folder is actually the same place, but windows sees it with two different paths in the redirection, the move operation will just delete the folder.

 

There is a gpo option to help with this if it is the issue: Verify old and new Folder Redirection targets point to the same share before redirecting. Don't just turn it on though, it needs some testing first to make sure everything else is ok.

[smithson83]

The "Move the contents of Documents to the new location" option is enabled.

 

We are migrating from an old physical server to a new virtual Server (VM in a cluster on CSV), I've found out that DFS-R and CSV dont play well, so I have been demoting and removing the old file server (and New Secondary File Server in a nother building) from DFS to remove the replication aspect. I started this as the pupils were losing work due to the DFS-R lag and timeout when the old file server suddenly ran out of space (Thanks GCSE ART).

 

So the Pupils HomeFolder has never mapped physically to the UNC or FQDN of the new file server, only ever via DFS. however they were origianlly set us to use \\Server\Share$\%username% on the old physical server.

Edited July 13, 2017 by smithson83

[smithson83]

Actually, there was a change made from \\domain\DFS-SHare\Folder-Target to \\domain.local\DFS-SHare\Folder-Target for accomodate Foldr's WebDav Mapping.

 

Could that have caused this issue?

 

If you, is there something you can suggest as a fix, as I still have 100's of users who could potentially suffer the same home folder deletion.

 

 

Starting to think this belongs What will you admit to thread

Edited July 13, 2017 by smithson83

[DMcCoy]

Actually, there was a change made from \\domain\DFS-SHare\Folder-Target to \\domain.local\DFS-SHare\Folder-Target for accomodate Foldr's WebDav Mapping.

 

Could that have caused this issue?

 

If you, is there something you can suggest as a fix, as I still have 100's of users who could potentially suffer the same home folder deletion.

 

This UNC change will be the issue, the path is stored for the redirection in two ways for the same location. The updating from one to the other will cause the deletion you are seeing.

 

The policy to prevent this is under Computer -> Windows Components -> File Explorer -> "Verify old and new Folder Redirection targets point to the same share before redirecting"

 

Test it, but it should be what you want in this instance to stop it removing the files.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the description:

 

This policy setting allows you to prevent data loss when you change the target location for Folder Redirection, and the new and old targets point to the same network share, but have different network paths.

 

If you enable this policy setting, Folder Redirection creates a temporary file in the old location in order to verify that new and old locations point to the same network share. If both new and old locations point to the same share, the target path is updated and files are not copied or deleted. The temporary file is deleted.

 

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, Folder Redirection does not create a temporary file and functions as if both new and old locations point to different shares when their network paths are different.

 

Note: If the paths point to different network shares, this policy setting is not required. If the paths point to the same network share, any data contained in the redirected folders is deleted if this policy setting is not enabled.

[smithson83]

If this works you may have just saved my job. I'm testing as we speak.

 

If it works, I may have no option to just enable it and see how it goes. it can't be worse than restoring 100's of folders each time a new lesson starts.

[smithson83]

Say if I don't test it fully, and just apply it for tomorrow.

 

In theory, what is the worse that could happen?

[DMcCoy]

All it's supposed to do is create a file in the new location, and if it sees it in both, it updates the registry paths without moving the files. There shouldn't be any major issues as long as machines are later than Win 7, or Win 7 that are mostly up to date. There are some minor issues that there was a hotfix for, but I guess it can't be worse than deleting folders on login!

[DMcCoy]

Oh, and do remember it's only going to start helping once the machine policy has been applied, so it's still going to happen sometimes until everything has applied the new policy or updated their redirection paths (it should only happen to a user once due to the redirection path update).

[smithson83]

Yeah, I seem to only see it once per user (some twice, but only a few).

 

Still testing. New vs existing profiles, restarts vs log offs etc.

 

Did I say you may have saved my job.... I'm not kidding SLT are NOT Happy

[smithson83]

@DMcCoy the GP setting has worked a treat... thanks again

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Just to say we had the odd few student home folders disappearing sporatically over the last academic year. Never got to the bottom of it and as it was only the odd few users here and there it's at the bottom of our to do list. From reading this I think we had moved the redirection share path but it was pointing to the same location.

 

Thanks for saving us time!