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Roaming user profile

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A roaming user profile is a concept in the Windows NT family of

operating systems that allows users with a computer joined to a Windows
Server domain to log on to any computer on the same network and access
their documents and have a consistent desktop experience, such as
applications remembering toolbar positions and preferences, or the
desktop appearance staying the same.

Method of operation

All Windows operating systems since Windows NT 3.1 are designed to

support roaming profiles. Normally, a standalone computer stores the
user's documents, desktop items, application preferences, and desktop
appearance on the local computer in two divided sections, consisting of the
portion that could roam plus an additional temporary portion containing
items such as the web browser cache. The Windows registry is similarly
divided to support roaming; there are System and Local Machine hives that
stay on the local computer, plus a separate User hive (HKEY CURRENT
USER) designed to be able to roam with the user profile.

When a roaming user is created, the user's profile information is instead

stored on a centralized file server accessible from any network-joined
desktop computer. The login prompt on the local computer checks to see if
the user exists in the domain rather than on the local computer; no pre-
existing account is required on the local computer. If the domain login is
successful, the roaming profile is copied from the central file server to the
desktop computer, and a local account is created for the user.
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When the user logs off from the desktop computer, the user's roaming
profile is merged from the local computer back to the central file server,
not including the temporary local profile items. Because this is a merge and
not a move/delete, the user's profile information remains on the local
computer in addition to being merged to the network.

When the user logs in on a second desktop computer, this process repeats,
merging the roaming profile from the server to the second desktop
computer, and then merging back from the desktop to the server when the
user logs off.

When the user returns to the first desktop computer and logs in, the
roaming profile is merged with the previous profile information, replacing
it. If profile caching is enabled, the server is capable of merging only the
newest files to the local computer, reusing the existing local files that have
not changed since the last login, and thereby speeding up the login process.

Limitations

Performance

A roaming profile that is several years old can contain tens

of thousands of cookies, which make network login and
logout extremely slow, and contribute to file system
fragmentation.

Due to the profile copying at login and logout, a roaming profile set up
using the default configuration can be extremely slow and waste
considerable amounts of time for users with large amounts of data in their
account.

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When Microsoft designed Internet Explorer, the programmers made an

explicit decision to store cookies and favorites as tiny individual files less
than a kilobyte each, rather than storing this data as a single large
consolidated file. Microsoft also stores shortcut files in the Recent profile
folder, linking to recently opened files and folders.

File servers tend to only transfer large files several megabytes in size at the
fastest possible network speed. Hundreds of very small files only a kilobyte
per file can reduce network performance by 90%. As a profile ages and
accumulates hundreds to thousands of cookies, favorites, and Recent
items, the login and logout times become progressively slower, even
though these files occupy only a few megabytes of profile data.

Local caching of the user profile on a desktop computer hard drive can
reduce and improve login and logout times, but at the penalty of cluttering
up the hard drive with profile data from every cached user who logs in.
Local caching is more suitable where people tend to use the same computer
every day. Local profile caching is not useful where hundreds to thousands
of students need to be able to use any computer across a school or
university campus—the cumulative cached data from so many different
profiles can consume all available lab computer disk space.

WAN links

Users with a roaming profile can encounter crippling logon delays when
logging in over a WAN. If connected to the domain from a remote site,
after authentication, Windows will attempt to pull the user's profile from
the location specified in Active Directory. If the location happens to be
across a WAN link it can potentially slow the WAN down to a crawl and
cause the logon to fail (after a very lengthy delay).

Users with a roaming profile working from a remote site should login to
the machine before connecting to the network, (so that the machine uses
its cached local copy) and connect to the network after logon has

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completed. Another option is to remove the roaming profile path from

Active Directory prior to their departure.[clarification needed] This must be
done in enough time that the change is replicated to the relevant Domain
Controller at the remote site.

Profile size

Working with large files, such as editing raw videos, can cause excessive
login and logout times, as Windows will copy files in the roaming profile to
the computer on login and back to the server on logout.

In environments where the large files are not mission-critical and do not
absolutely need to be backed up to a server on a per-login basis, the
applications requiring such excessively large amounts of user data are
instead usually run on a stand-alone local account that does not roam, to
bypass these network storage and retrieval problems.

Example of third-party software (Sun Microsystems Java)

storing temporary files and software updates in the
roaming profile. The bloated roaming profile increases
login and logout times. The stored updates shown are
unnecessary after installation, yet they are not deleted.

Network congestion

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In a school environment, roaming can result in severe network congestion

and slowness when an entire classroom of students log off computers at the
same time, and then within minutes are attempting to log in somewhere
else. Inconsistency in account data can result if the students begin to log
into the second location before the profile uploading and log out from the
first location has finished.

Misbehaving programs don't exit

Some programs installed on desktop computers do not properly release

control of the User registry during logoff, and can result in corrupted
profiles because the User registry copying never successfully completes. To
deal with this, Microsoft created a utility known as the User Profile Hive
Cleanup Service which will forcibly remap the file handles for these
misbehaving programs so that the profile copying can finish successfully
and the account logoff is successful.[1] However, the hung program may
remain on the local computer still holding the local cached copy of the User
registry in a busy state, until the computer is rebooted.

Synchronization at logoff

The most recent version of a file in a roaming profile without redirection is

stored only on the local computer, and stays there until the user logs off,
whereupon it transfers to the server. If nightly server backups are done,
and a roaming user does not log off for days at a time, their roaming
account documents are not being included in the nightly backup.

Further, if a roaming user uses standby or hibernation to turn off the

computer at night, their profile is still not copied to the network. In this
manner it is possible for a roaming account's documents to not be backed
up for days to weeks at a time, and there is the potential for considerable
data loss if the local hard drive suffers a catastrophic failure during these
long periods of not logging off the roaming account from the local
computer.

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Access conflict

Due to the underlying file copying mechanism from server to desktop,

roaming assumes the user account is logged on to only a single computer at
a time. Documents in a roaming profile copied down to the local machine
have no network awareness of each other, and it is not possible to use file
locking to alert the user that the file is already open.

Logging onto multiple computers with one account, and opening the same
document multiple times on each computer can result in inconsistencies
and loss of saved changes if the file is modified on two different computers
at the same time:

When the first computer with the modified document logs off, the
changes are written to the network copy of the profile.
When the second computer logs off, the different document version
overwrites the previously saved changes during profile logout.

Compatibility

Different versions of Windows may employ different incompatible user

profile layouts. As such, a user that roams between computers with
different operating systems needs separate roaming profiles for each
operating system. Windows Vista and Windows 7 add ".v2" suffix to the
user profile folder to isolate it from the user profiles of Windows XP and
earlier. Even so, Microsoft TechNet advises users not roam between
computers running Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008 and Windows
7/Windows Server 2008 R2. User profiles in Windows 8/Windows Server
2012 and Windows 8.1/Windows Server 2012 R2 are also not entirely
backward-compatible, although they initially used ".v2" suffix as well.
Microsoft later released hotfixes and instructions to enable these operating
systems to append ".v3" and ".v4" suffixes respectively, segregating them
from cross-OS access.[2][3][4][5]

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Folder redirection

Further information: Folder redirection

To deal with these profile copying problems, it is possible to override the

default operation of roaming, and set up user accounts so that certain parts
of the profile are accessed by the local computer directly on a central file
server rather than copying to the local computer first.[6] If the server goes
down, users can still access some files with Offline Files Enhancements.

To the end-user, folder redirection generally does not appear to function

any differently from using a normal standalone computer. Redirecting the
user's My Documents and Desktop to be accessed directly on a file server
are the first two big steps for speeding up roaming profiles. However, as
3rd party software have begun to store more and more data in the
Application Data portion of the roaming profile, it has also become useful
to redirect that to also be accessed directly on the server.

The question may be raised as to why the entire roaming profile can not be
accessed directly on the server, and no copying needs to be done at all. The
reasoning for this appears to be that certain Microsoft programs running
all the time on the client computer can not tolerate the sudden loss of their
data folders if the server goes down or the network is disconnected. Some
portions must still be copied back and forth before the desktop appears so
that these folders are available if the network-redirected folders go down.

Caveats

Some programs do not work properly with redirected profile folders that
refer to a UNC file path on a server share:
\\server\share\username\Application Data

Windows Command prompt cannot have a UNC working directory, so

batch files usually fail.

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It is not possible to install Microsoft Office VSTO add-ins on a UNC

path. (AppData can be a natural place for users to install addins
without administration privileges.)
Adobe Reader has been incompatible with Application Data located on
a UNC file path since at least version 9.0, which would crash with a
runtime error.[7] Adobe Reader X (10.0) is partially compatible but
will not run in document protection mode on a UNC path.
OpenOffice.org 3.3 is similarly incompatible with Application Data on
a UNC path, and the software crashes on startup.[8] A fix has been
developed and will be available in an upcoming release.
Roaming Profiles and redirection are not supported by AutoCAD[9]
2013.

These problems with UNC paths can usually be fixed by having the folders
redirected to a drive mapping for the UNC share:

Drive N: (say) is mapped to \\server\share\userhomedir

AppDir folder redirection to user home directory:N:\Application Data

However, use of drive mappings is generally deprecated by Microsoft, and

UNC-only redirection paths are the preferred implementation.

Application software versions on various machines used with the same

profile may need to be kept in sync, with the same options installed,
otherwise software configuration files may refer to dynamic libraries
or extensions or other resources that are not available on another
machine, causing system crash or limited features or corruption of the
configuration.
Installing software under one account may cause software to be only
partially functional for other accounts due to the resources being
unavailable to other users depending on their access rights to the
installer's personal folders.

Mandatory profiles
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Folder redirection with mandatory profiles

Folder redirection may be used with mandatory profiles, and is useful in

situations where it is desirable to "lock down" the general desktop
appearance but still allow users to save documents to the network. For
example, this can be used as a generic account for anyone to use without a
password for temporary use.

Redirecting My Documents and the Desktop in a mandatory profile will

allow documents to be saved, but at logoff, any changes to the desktop
appearance such as the desktop picture, Internet Explorer cookies,
Favorites, and the Recent documents opened list are reverted to the
original state.[10]

Folder redirection with mandatory profiles is accomplished by denying

write access to the central copy of the profile. When users log off, they may
expect to regularly receive an error that the profile could not successfully
be copied back to the server. A user should also be aware that storing data
in certain locations may cause their data to be lost. For example, if the
desktop is reset every time a user logs on with the mandatory profile's
desktop, then although it seems fine to save files on the desktop, when the
user logs off, the profile does not get copied to the server, and when the
user logs back on, any work saved on the desktop is permanently lost
without any advance notice other than the error on logout that the profile
could not be copied.

Setup methods

Active Directory

The systems administrator specifies a location for each user account as to

where on the network the users roaming will be stored, the location is
typically on a Windows server setup to be file server. In Windows 2000
and later versions, the profile location is set using the Active Directory

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Users and Computers snap-in. Windows NT 4.0 and earlier used the User
Manager for Domains program. When a user logs into a computer joined
to a domain, the roaming user profile is downloaded from the server onto
the local computer and applied. When the user logs off, the changes made
to the roaming profile are transferred back to the location where the users
roaming profile is stored.

Workstations running Windows 95, 98 or Me can also have roaming

profiles, however the users roaming profile files in Windows 9x are stored
in the users Home directory even if a separate location for roaming is
specified. In order to use roaming profiles in Windows 9x each workstation
needs to be setup to have separate profile settings for each user that logs
into the local workstation enabled. Enabling separate desktop settings in
Windows 9x is enabled under Passwords in the Windows Control Panel.

Roaming profiles on Windows 95, 98 and Me are all compatible with each
other so if a network has mixture of Windows 95 and Windows 98
workstations the same user profile may be used for each workstation. This
is also the case with Roaming profiles between Windows NT 4.0, Windows
2000, Windows XP but there may be some compatibility issues due to
differences in each version of Windows. Roaming profiles in Windows
Vista and Windows 7 are compatible with each other but these versions are
not compatible with earlier versions of Windows. A separate profile folder
with the extension .V2 will be created when using Roaming profiles with
Windows Vista or 7. The easiest solution is to have all workstations
running the same version of Windows. (see Compatibility section)

Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Server Users

Remote Desktop Server users can have a separate roaming profile to the
roaming profile used on a local desktop PC. The roaming profile for remote
desktop user is specified under the "Remote Desktop Services Profile" tab.
This applies to users who connect to a remote desktop server using Citrix

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XenApp or RDP. If no remote desktop roaming profile is specified then the

user will use the same roaming profile setup for local desktops.

Novell eDirectory/Netware

For roaming to work with Novell servers, the Novell product "ZENworks
Desktop Management" needs to be installed on the server, and its
associated workstation management package installed on each of the client
computers. Within the directory, a User Package object is created, which
enables roaming, specifies where the roaming profile is stored, and also
stores any associated group policies for each version of Windows where
users will login. The User Package also enables Dynamic Local User, which
functions similar to Active Directory, allowing an account created in
eDirectory to log in on any desktop computer even if no local account exists
in advance, and assigns local account privileges such as User, Power User,
or Administrator to the newly created local user account. For Windows NT
the user profile files are stored in the users home directory under a
subfolder for each version of Windows, for example in Windows NT 4.0 the
folder will be called "Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Profile" and in
Windows XP the folder will be called "Windows NT 5.1 Workstation
Profile"

The User Package can be associated with a specific user account in the
directory, or is associated with an organizational unit that then applies to
all user accounts within that OU. The User Package also enables additional
ZENworks Desktop Management functions, such as remote view and
remote control of the desktop computer, network printers that follow the
user from one desktop to the next, and the scheduling of events that are to
be run wherever the user is logged in.

Windows 3.x

While Windows 3.x does not contain user profiles it was possible for users
to have their own personalised desktop in a business environment.

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Windows 3.x had an administrative setup option which network

administrators could use by typing setup.exe /a Windows could then be
installed to a network share. Windows setup was then run from each local
machine to install a few local files making Windows 3.1 capable of being
run over a network. The local files could be saved to a user's home
directory on a Novell or Windows NT Domain network allowing the user to
have his or her settings roam between machines, the local machine in this
scenario did not require a hard drive and could have been booted from a
floppy or network card.

Resetting a profile

Occasionally a users profile may need to be reset if the profile becomes

corrupt or to resolve an issue with an application, a reset would normally
be performed by a systems administrator or helpdesk staff. To perform a
reset the affected user needs to log out of the system and then the folder
where the users roaming profile is stored on the server is then renamed,
the user profile must also be deleted from the local workstation the user
logs into otherwise the user will take the locally stored profile on next
login. When the profile has been cleared from the local machine when the
user logs in a new profile will be generated using the default profile stored
on the workstation, when the user logs out the profile will be copied back to
the location where the users roaming profile was stored.

Advantages

Enforcement of administrative control by using mandatory user

profiles which helps to protect the user's environment from being
damaged by the user himself/herself.
Users can access their data anywhere in the network with more
reliability
Easier backup as most data is in one location on the server

Disadvantages
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Each time a user logs into a workstation, all of the files and settings are
transferred over the network; the result is that the login process takes
longer than if the user were to use a local profile. This is particularly the
case if the profile is large in size. The login time may be reduced if the
profile is cached as some files can be loaded from the local workstation and
by using folder redirection to redirect folders that can grow to a large size,
like My Documents, to a network share.

However, this limitation has been addressed in Windows Server 2008

Active Directory by allowing folder redirection of almost all folders that
were previously stored in a user's profile (including My Music, Favorites,
and others) to a centralized and secured network share. This means that a
user's roaming profile can easily be reduced to size smaller than 20MB,
thus eliminating the long login times that were experienced with previous
versions of AD. When using folder redirection and automatic caching of
offline files, all of a user's files and preferences are available offline and
synced in a much more efficient manner than previously possible when the
computer is reconnected to the network using Remote Differential
Compression (RDC).

Another problem is related to different set of applications installed on

machines, applications stores information into Local Settings and some
into the registry, but only the registry is transferred across. It can corrupt
application functionality under roaming profile.

Redirected folder sharing

Redirected network folders are able to override the separation between

2000/XP and Vista/Win7. For example, both types of profiles can be
redirected to use a single Documents folder, and a single Desktop folder, so
that the user's account documents are consistent between the two profiles,
even if all other account settings will be different.

Redirected sharing of folders such as Application Data may lead to data

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corruption, since Microsoft did not intend this for their application data to
be shared between the different OS versions.

Alternatives

User virtualization programs (such as AppSense) manage user profiles,

settings, and data, storing them in a network share or the cloud.

See also

Folder redirection

References

1. ^ User Profile Hive Cleanup Service

2. ^ "Deploy Roaming User Profiles". TechNet. Microsoft. 19 March
2014. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
3. ^ "Incompatibility between Windows 8 roaming user profiles and
roaming profiles in other versions of Windows". Support (3.0 ed.).
Microsoft. 26 January 2014. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
4. ^ "Incompatibility between Windows 8.1 roaming user profiles and
those in earlier versions of Windows". Support (3.0 ed.). Microsoft.
18 December 2013. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
5. ^ Beach, David (31 July 2013). "Roaming Profile Compatibility - The
Windows 7 to Windows 8 Challenge". Ask the Directory Services
Team. Microsoft. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
6. ^ Microsoft TechNet, Windows Server 2008, Group Policy
Management, User Folder Redirection, Folder Redirection Overview
[1]
7. ^ Adobe knowledge-base: Runtime error | Roaming Profile workflows
| Acrobat, Reader 9 http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404597.html
8. ^ bug report, Open Office 3.3 incompatible with redirected
Application Data http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?
id=115778

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9. ^ Alex Numann [@GuamDon] (5 September 2013). "@AutoCAD Do I

really need to pay for a subscription to get some tech support? Your
product doesn't work with network users? Very surprising" (Tweet)
– via Twitter.
10. ^ Microsoft MSDN, 2012-06-06, "Mandatory User Profiles", Quote: "
[...] a user can modify his or her desktop, but the changes are not
saved when the user logs off.", http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/bb776895(v=vs.85).aspx

External links

Microsoft MSDN Library: Reference on User Profiles

Microsoft TechNet: Windows Server 2003 Product Help: User Profiles
best practices
Microsoft TechNet: Windows Server 2003: Operations Whitepaper:
Best Practices for User Profiles

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