Is there any way to avoid copying a user's Terminal Server profile upon logoff/logon?

Question

Currently, we have a TS with all user profiles stored locally. We have a DR server, which is synced by robocopying the C:\Users folder and performing manual configuration on the other end to update the links to the profiles (for new users).

This is obviously cumbersome. What I want to do is configure the user account objects to point to the TS profiles on a share (the settings/files would then be replicated via AD and DFS). However, the issue is that several users have large application files (a few GB) under AppData\Local, and we want to avoid having them copy each time a user logs on or logs off (does TS/RDS do differential copies on logoff/logon?). I created a local share on the server so the server will point to itself, but this still triggers the copy. I've also thought about making C:\Users a share so the network path will completely overlap the actual files, but I haven't tried it yet, and something tells me that this is a bad idea.

What is the best way to implement this?

Edit: Another requirement is that AppData\Local must remain consistent across profiles, meaning that it should be the same in production and DR. Apparently, Folder Redirection only works with AppData\Roaming, so that isn't a complete solution. It seems that the majority of the size of these profiles is in AppData\Local, so that's the key to handling this.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 05 '13 at 18:25

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Why doing copy? Use Folder Redirection. The data always remain on the storage where you keep the user profiles.

answered Mar 05 '13 at 18:25

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 05 '13 at 19:51

You could look into having a server share be the users directories. You would then just access it like a normal share instead of copying it each and every time. Granted I realize the appdata issue may not work as well, but frankly I've always opted to not worry about that kind of data as folder replication hasn't always been the greatest.

Another option is to see if you can update to server 2012 which includes this little nugget: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/11/13/easier-user-data-management-with-user-profile-disks-in-windows-server-2012.aspx

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 18 '13 at 23:51

This certainly isn't orthodox, but we ended up DFS replicating C:\Users on both servers and copying over the ProfileList registry key at regular intervals. If the main server fails, the other one will be ready to go with an up-to-date copy of all users' data.

Is there any way to avoid copying a user's Terminal Server profile upon logoff/logon?

3 Answers3