Roaming profiles

[Katanand45]

I am trying to set up roaming profiles on my office network (Windows 2000 server and Active directory). My main purpose for this is simple user profile backups since everyone saves everything in either "my documents" or their desktop.

What I want to happen is, when a person logs off, any changes they made locally gets saved to the server. When they log back on I do no want anything to synchronize. The server copy is just a backup should a hard drive fail on a workstation. This is not a backup againts 1D10T errors like deleting a file by mistake.

These are some problems I'm running into and I'm not sure if it is a configuration issue or if this is how roaming profiles are supposed to work.

• When a file is delete locally and the user logs out, the file is not deleted from the server. When the user logs back in the deleted file reappears(very very annoying and may blow up space usage.).

• If a file were deleted from the server, when the user logs in the local copy is delete as well(very very bad).

Can these "problems" be fixed or is this working as intended?

 

[rasczak]

Instead of redirecting their my docs folder, couldn't you create a user share they could map to and have them save all of their files there instead? this way you get around the synch issues (i believe).

also is it necessary to have a roaming profile?

 

[DnetMHZ]

Originally posted by: jpbelauskas
Instead of redirecting their my docs folder, couldn't you create a user share they could map to and have them save all of their files there instead? this way you get around the synch issues (i believe).

also is it necessary to have a roaming profile?

This is what we do. Everybody has their My Docs pointed to S:\Users\UserName\ so nothing is saved to the local machine. Telling users to just save to My Docs is easier than explaining another directory system since by default office apps, etc. already point there.

 

[Katanand45]

Originally posted by: DnetMHZ

Originally posted by: jpbelauskas
Instead of redirecting their my docs folder, couldn't you create a user share they could map to and have them save all of their files there instead? this way you get around the synch issues (i believe).

also is it necessary to have a roaming profile?

This is what we do. Everybody has their My Docs pointed to S:\Users\UserName\ so nothing is saved to the local machine. Telling users to just save to My Docs is easier than explaining another directory system since by default office apps, etc. already point there.

I do not want to do that because 1) this will screw up those with laptops if they are not connected to the network. 2) I would have to reconfigured(manually) the outlook on over 60 computers to store PST files in this location, 3) This will hammer the server way too much. 4) I'd have to buy a backup server for the new server I'm buying to implement this.

Right now, users back up nothing.

 

[RebateMonger]

What you need is a giant version of Windows Home Server, that can connect to 60 client PCs.

Barring that, it sounds like you need to run some sort of backup software or backup agent on the clients I believe that all the Windows Offline File stuff wants to synchronize files/folders, rather than just make copies.

 

[Katanand45]

I found a program called Microsoft SyncToy This program does exactly want I , except the end user would need to run it manually.

With SyncToy you select a folder pair. A "left" folder and a "right" folder. You then select your sync action. What I'm trying to do for my backup plan would be an "echo".
New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.

Is there anyway to setup roaming profiles to do the same, or is there something else that would let me do this?

If not, I'll just install this application on everything workstation in my office and configure it for each user. I will teach the end users how to run the the sync. It's not the best option but it's much better than what we have now(no real backup system to speak of.)