Realtime Roaming profile saving

[DanSchlim]

We are trying to get roaming profiles up and running. I have it to the
point where it will save the files, but it only saves files after
logoff. is there any way to set it up so that when someone saves a
file, it automatically saves to the designated shared drive instead of
waiting until they have to logoff before it dumps the saved documents
in the appropriate place? We are thinking about using thin clients
with a 512MB "hard drive". the problem is, if someone decides that
they need to open a file larger than 512 it will not let them. i
basically want the thin client to be a passthrough. any ideas? Any
help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Guest]

A Thin Client is a very different animal from a Roaming Profile setup.

Thin clients typically function much as a 'TV Set' would - they view (and
manipulate) the operations taking place on a server. No data actually travels
to the thin client, it all stays on the server.

Roaming Profiles, OTOH, download the entire user's workspace from the server
onto the (fat!) client at the start of each session. At logoff, they upload
it back to the server. The amount of data to transfer is mitigated to some
extent in 2000/XP (but not in NT4) by doing date/time comparisons and only
uploading changed files on that basis.

If users are creating 512MB files (video?) then roaming profiles are highly
unsuitable for your purpose. If (for example) the caption on a video file is
changed, that might involve a few dozen bytes of data being altered, but the
effect is that the entire 512MB file has to be re-copied at logoff. The
result can be that if many users with large files log-on at once, it might
literally be 15min before anyone's desktop appears.

Roaming profiles are typically used in 'cubicle farm' setups so that any
user can walk-up to any free computer and see their own files and settings.
The penalty is that to keep logons reasonably fast, strict quotas will almost
always have to be imposed on users' data.

If there is no need for users to actually download the data onto their
computers' local disks, then it makes far more sense to store all the data
in a server share, and work from there. The only class of people this might
not suit are laptop users who want to have access to all their files when
away from base.

If the issue is purely one of users needing to log-on at any computer
without that computer losing its settings, then the answer might lie in my
sig below.