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I have tried to setup roaming profiles on Windows 2008 R2 Server running with all Win7 client PCs. I have setup folder redirection for My Documents, Desktop, Favorites and AppData.

Have two questions

  1. The folder redirection part seems to be working as expected. The user and all folders under it get created and I see files in them. But the roaming profile does not seem to work. The roaming profile folder does get created with a .V2 appended to the username but it shows empty with nothing in it. I have logging on as that user a couple of times (BTW: The roaming profile is setup in AD and not in Group Policy). I have doubled checked the Share and NTFS permissions as in other threads on this site and they look correct.

  2. How is roaming profile different than redirecting My Documents, Desktop, Favorites and AppData. In other words what else gets shared/centralized by enabling roaming profiles.

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  1. Can you tell us specifically what the Share and NTFS permissions are?

  2. Roaming profiles and Folder Redirection are two independent components but are often used together. Folders that you redirect that are normally a part of the user profile are separated from the user profile when you use Folder Redirection. The use of Folder Redirection serves to decrease logon and logoff times by reducing the size of the roaming profile. All components of the profile other than those folders that are redirected become centralized on the server share where you've configured roaming profiles to be created. When a user logs on, a copy of the roaming profile is copied locally to the machine the user is logging on to. When the user logs off, the profile (and any changes to the profile) are copied back to the roaming profile share on the server. Roaming profiles use a "last writer wins" mechanism to determine what changes should be copied to/from the roaming profile share.

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  • Joeqwerty, Share Permissions Authenticated Users - Change, Administrators - Full NTFS Permissions Creator Owner - Full, System - Full, Administrators - Full, Domain Admins - Full, Authenticated Users - List Folder and Create Folder (This folder only) Sorry can't get newlines in there.
    – Garfield81
    Jun 17, 2011 at 2:58
  • This article was published for W2K3 but is still applicable for W2K8. Try setting the Share and NTFS permissions to match those in the article: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737633(WS.10).aspx
    – joeqwerty
    Jun 17, 2011 at 3:07
  • Looked through it and table 4 and 5 look exactly as what I have. As for Table 5 which specifies each user folder the server creates it automatically so do I have to change it's permissions?
    – Garfield81
    Jun 17, 2011 at 3:10
  • The permissions in table 5 should be set automatically when Windows creates the roaming profile folders. You should not manually modify or set these permissions. If the permissions that are being set on each users roaming profile folder don't match what's listed in table 5 then I think there may be a problem with the way you have permissions set in tables 3 and 4. If these aren't in production yet (I'm assuming not since it doesn't sound like they're being created properly yet) then I might suggest you wipe things out and start from scratch based on the settings/permissions in the article.
    – joeqwerty
    Jun 17, 2011 at 3:28
  • I have being trying to get this work for the past 3 hours. Created new Share folders based on the permissions, created new users and set their profile in ADUC to the new share. No luck and in every case the username.V2 folder gets created but it's empty. Also I have noticed the logon process is a little slow but logoff are really quick where it should be writing the data back to the server. Also checked my application logs on the client machines and no errors. I think I have hit a brick wall.
    – Garfield81
    Jun 17, 2011 at 23:23
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Hope this helps someone. Had to remove all startup objects using msconfig and then rebooted and the profile got saved back to server. Disabling the services one by one reveled that it was a Welcome application installed by Acer that doesn't release the profile to be saved back to the server.

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  • It worked. For us, it is a less known 3rd-party application. Disabling it solved the issue. Thanks on behalf of my colleague
    – wandersick
    Aug 22, 2018 at 9:40

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