Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

folder redirection

Synopsis

A method of changing the storage location of key user folders to a centrally located network share.

Description

A useful feature of Group Policy in Windows 2000 is folder redirection, which allows My Documents, Start menu, Desktop, and Application Data folders for each user be centrally located on a network share instead of each user’s local machine. These folders are normally part of a user’s profile and are stored locally in the C:\Documents and Settings\<username> folder on the client computer that the user uses.

There are several advantages to redirecting folders:

• It makes users’ work easier to back up since datafiles are stored in a central location on a network file server.

• The data in these folders can be accessed easily by users no matter which computers they use to log on to the network.

Folder redirection is an alternative to implementing roaming users on your network and has several advantages over implementing roaming users:

• My Documents and other special folders are normally part of a user’s roaming profile, and when a roaming user logs on to a computer, her entire roaming profile (including My Documents and its contents) is copied to the local computer. This is done to create a local profile on the machine and can use up a lot of disk space on client computers if users have a lot of files in My Documents and if a lot of users share a single machine. In addition, the bigger the contents of My Documents, the longer it takes for a roaming user ...