Folder Redirection

[Ken B]

Hey All-

I'm looking to move all of my users (about 200) My Documents folders from
their desktop to the server level using folder redirection (and some will
have manual synchronization on laptops).

Does anyone have any advice for what I should look out for?

How can I get a feeling for how much server space I need to do this? I know
that some of my users can (and do) have large My Doc's folders, and some
others keep them small. Is there a way I can find out how much space I'm
going to need (and allow for room to grow on), or am I going to have to do a
rough estimate and guess how much space I'll need?

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide!

Ken
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Guest]

I suspect you need to do some sums to get an estimate.
One thing to remember is that hosting users folders on the server is always
exponential i.e. it tends to increase as in most cases users never seem to
remember to remove 'old' files.

If you have many 'heavy' users then consider replication/synchronisation
traffic.
Consider mapping home directories if your network cannot handle the load.

 

[Herb Martin]

Hey All-

I'm looking to move all of my users (about 200) My Documents folders from
their desktop to the server level using folder redirection (and some will
have manual synchronization on laptops).

If you do this by altering the PROFILE (roaming)
then I know that it will copy the existing profile
which includes the My Documents directory.

It will do this from the machine to which they NEXT
logon after you change it.

For moving the My Documents alone, check the KB
or someone else will respond but I just cannot recall
at the moment.

Does anyone have any advice for what I should look out for?

If you do it by altering the settings (as you generally should)
and are depending on the automatic copy then:

Watch out for users logging on to the WRONG (not their
habitual machine) on the FIRST logon after the change.

If they do this, they will pick up the default profile there
(or some less desirable cached copy they left there
previously) -- BE SURE to send users to their "favorite"
machine for (at least) the first logon.

How can I get a feeling for how much server space I need to do this?

Build a batch job to check it and send you the results.
(Run as a startup script with computer name or user
name in the output so you can run another central axx
script to "add 'em up".)

The following will get the info (if you don't care about
it being rather crude):

Dir /s "%userprofile%" > \\%LogonServer%\Size\%username%.txt

Loop through all of the files and find the NEXT to
last line that isn't blank (or the 3rd from end counting
the blank line, OR the one after the line with
"Total Files Listed") and add them up:

Total Files Listed:
10 File(s) 836,743 bytes
5 Dir(s) 4,533,723,136 bytes free
[BLANK LINE HERE IN DIR COMMAND OUTPUT]

BTW, Perl is the ideal tool for doing such things.

I know
that some of my users can (and do) have large My Doc's folders, and some
others keep them small. Is there a way I can find out how much space I'm
going to need (and allow for room to grow on), or am I going to have to do a
rough estimate and guess how much space I'll need?

200 users X 1-Gig each (seems a reasonable max for
most settings) only gives 200 Gig -- which is still a CHEAP
drive these days. Mirror it or use RAID5 (software
or hardware for extra safety.)