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Folder Redirection Help

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  • Hardware
  • Business Computing
Last response: in Business Computing
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April 1, 2013 12:51:03 PM

Hello Toms Hardware people. I have an issue and wanted to hear about some fixes.

We have just shy of 50 users here at the office. Before I showed up people had a network share (i: drive), but they normally saved to their documents (c:\users\[username]\documents). So it wasn't getting backed up.

I set up folder redirection on my computer to \\[networkshare]\[username]. Tested offline files and they seemed to work fine. However, when saving, it was really slow (going across the network to save files.)

What is the best way to have users save locally and backup to their network share.

Thanks everyone for the help!

More about : folder redirection

April 1, 2013 1:23:46 PM

Folder Redirection seems to be a great feature for doing this. On one domain with similar needs, we set up folder redirection as a group policy object applied to the specific users and computers that we needed to have the My Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc folders moved onto the server. It seemed to work great, but over the last year we have had some issues with it. Data has been lost in the process of synchronizing with the server, using Offline files, and I'm very worried about it continuing to lose files during this process, so I am moving away from Folder Redirection at this point.

Granted, if everything is set up and working 100% I'm sure that using Folder Redirection is going to achieve what you need. In my situation, though, I think we are going to work on setting up Windows Backup & Restore utility to automatically backup the computer to the server. There's pros and cons to this of course. First, I do get an entire system backup doing this way, and can even restore lost programs and settings in the event that we have to recover a workstation, but the down side is it requires more room and it's all in a single backup file so you can't just go in and recover one or two files if you need.
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April 1, 2013 1:51:14 PM

The slowness during a sync is going to be a downfall of using that feature with your setup. If you have Windows 2008, you can use the folder redirect, disable offline files, and use VSS (Volume Shadow Service) to create real time backups of the files. If a user deletes/needs a restore, you can simply revert to the last known copy. By default I think it creates 8 copies a day and rolls over as necessary for disk space.
You can also use backup software to and create a backup method for that if you need to restore from tape/disk.

I would advise reviewing the VSS route.
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April 1, 2013 2:04:09 PM

riser said:
The slowness during a sync is going to be a downfall of using that feature with your setup. If you have Windows 2008, you can use the folder redirect, disable offline files, and use VSS (Volume Shadow Service) to create real time backups of the files. If a user deletes/needs a restore, you can simply revert to the last known copy. By default I think it creates 8 copies a day and rolls over as necessary for disk space.
You can also use backup software to and create a backup method for that if you need to restore from tape/disk.

I would advise reviewing the VSS route.


What would be the benefit of disabling offline files? Reason I ask is because more and more of our users are using laptops now and I would like them to access those files when they are off-site (Sales people and people who work from home).

I don't know if there is a easy way to make %username%/documents and %username%/desktop backup upon logoff as an alternative to Folder Redirection.

Thanks for the help!
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April 1, 2013 2:09:41 PM

Hey Riser thank you very much for the advice! I am going to do some looking into that VSS route as well, as it might solve some of the issues we are experiencing mainly due to offline files.
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April 2, 2013 7:25:42 AM

bawaggoner said:
riser said:
The slowness during a sync is going to be a downfall of using that feature with your setup. If you have Windows 2008, you can use the folder redirect, disable offline files, and use VSS (Volume Shadow Service) to create real time backups of the files. If a user deletes/needs a restore, you can simply revert to the last known copy. By default I think it creates 8 copies a day and rolls over as necessary for disk space.
You can also use backup software to and create a backup method for that if you need to restore from tape/disk.

I would advise reviewing the VSS route.


What would be the benefit of disabling offline files? Reason I ask is because more and more of our users are using laptops now and I would like them to access those files when they are off-site (Sales people and people who work from home).

I don't know if there is a easy way to make %username%/documents and %username%/desktop backup upon logoff as an alternative to Folder Redirection.

Thanks for the help!


Disable offline files for Desktops; Laptops would be another beast. The reality is they need to sync and update their files. The VSS would allow them to keep multile copies; how that would work on a laptop, I'm not quite sure. In regards to laptops, that's just an issue you'll have to deal with. The sync'ing is necessary and takes some time depending on the connection available.

In the past, I've turned them off and asked the users to backup their files or provided a means to do that. The reason being is that they tend to not sync their files and data loss occurs. It comes down to more of a mentality than a technology. In my case, no one is allowed to store files on their local hard drive. They must VPN in at least to get access to their files. Offsite, no internet, eh, kind of hard these days. Aircards are a solution to that.

It comes down to this: (Data loss vs risk vs cost) vs the laptop user's patience/mentality.

It's a tough decision and there really isn't a right one for everyone. The final question you would have to ask is, "Does this work for us?"
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April 2, 2013 8:45:00 AM

Thanks Riser for the help!

I do have another question. I was testing this on 2 different users, and they both said that accessing the files seemed to be significantly slower. I would take the tradeoff to save remotely to a server with a backup in place.

I honestly don't like the sound of requiring them to VPN to access their files. If they are complaining about downloading a file on the LAN at GB Ethernet Speeds, I don't want to know what they think of 1Mb/s Verizon 3G speeds to download those files.
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April 2, 2013 9:46:39 AM

If you have a lot of remote access users you need to allow, you might consider setting up a Remote Desktop Session Host which can be accessed from off-site. That way access to files still technically remains within the local network on your servers, instead of trying to pull data back and forth across a WAN connection.
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