Fixing roaming profiles \ AppData

[gshaw]

Ok this is a fun one

 

Since I've been here the roaming profiles for admin staff have always been slow and certain people have had profile corruption issues.

 

Digging through the folders a while back I pretty much found out why... AppData was redirected inside the profile folder so whenever you log in \ out hundreds of MB are copying each way... no wonder it's getting confused

 

So question is which way is best to try and get AppData where it should be (preferably \\server\Appdata\%username%) without disturbing the profiles if possible. Thing is though I'm thinking if I change the GPO to redirect the AppData to another location the local copy of the profile might still be holding old data which won't do any favours.

 

Maybe a better idea might be to set the GPO now to remove local copy of profile on logoff, set the AppData to redirect elsewhere then let the profiles recreate themselves on the local PCs once AppData has left the folder.

 

Or alternatively set AppData to new location, set profile to new location and enable clear local profile on next logon and start with a complete clean slate and take the short-term hit on user calls for the long-term benefits of clean shiny profiles

 

Your thoughts?

[john]

A word of warning with re-directed appdata, its can break various applications / make them a bit weird. One instant brand that comes to mind is Adobe software doesn't enjoy having re-directed Appdata.

[rh91uk]

I would go for the clean profiles, we moved the appdata out of the folders into a seperate share and it was a nightmare ... various files inside the appdata were locked.

 

I always now do clean profiles and redirected appdata to another location.

 

@john - I wrote a small fix for the adobe issue, i'll clean it up and post it....

[GREED]

I think many organisations suffer with this issue, and one that I found worked well was user awareness that we would clean out profile on a bi-yearly basis, before they had the potential to get too large. Once people got used to that we had no issues. Our biggest pain was that staff using Outlook would regually use the quick address feature (where outlook remembers recently used email addresses) to store their contacts, rather than actually creating a contact record. On deleting the profiles these addressed get last too.

[TechSupp]

We to have issues with the appdata section of users profiles getting large. How can we reduce the size of appdata in the profile without redirecting appdata itself? The rest of the profile is reasonably small, just appdata baloons the whole profile size up.

[gshaw]

I think many organisations suffer with this issue, and one that I found worked well was user awareness that we would clean out profile on a bi-yearly basis, before they had the potential to get too large. Once people got used to that we had no issues. Our biggest pain was that staff using Outlook would regually use the quick address feature (where outlook remembers recently used email addresses) to store their contacts, rather than actually creating a contact record. On deleting the profiles these addressed get last too.

 

If you look in the Outlook folder under Appdata\Microsoft you can copy over the NK2 file that has all the addresses in, then when it creates a profile rename the backed up NK2 to the new profile's name et voila addresses are back

 

Does sound like I'll be better off doing a new profiles$ share on the server with each user underneath (as it should be!) and then when ready to switch turn on the "delete local copy of profiles" just beforehand so when people move to the new profile folder the local copies won't exist.

 

As for AppData I remember the Adobe Reader bug a while back, I'm in two minds what to do with it as it's redirected OK at the moment, just bizarrely directed back into the profile folder!

[Arthur]

If you look in the Outlook folder under Appdata\Microsoft you can copy over the NK2 file that has all the addresses in, then when it creates a profile rename the backed up NK2 to the new profile's name et voila addresses are back

With Outlook 2010, you no longer have a NK2 file. The addresses get stored in the PST itself (under Suggested Contacts). Much better.

[gshaw]

Thanks for the info, we're running 2010 on our IT office PCs at the moment... leaving staff on 2007 for now

[GREED]

With Outlook 2010, you no longer have a NK2 file. The addresses get stored in the PST itself (under Suggested Contacts). Much better.

 

Awesome, about time!

[tarquel]

A word of warning with re-directed appdata, its can break various applications / make them a bit weird. One instant brand that comes to mind is Adobe software doesn't enjoy having re-directed Appdata.

 

hehe With regards to Adobe Reader 9.x, they've released 9.4 which has fixed the problem for us

[rh91uk]

thanks Tarquel ... that has fixed it for us too!

[kili]

Ok this is a fun one

 

enable clear local profile on next logon

 

Your thoughts?

 

Where would you find this? I cant see it under GPO editor on my windows 2003 server

 

cheers

 

Kili