Migrating local profiles to roaming profiles
We are in the process of moving users over to our PDC. We delete each user's local account on their PC, create them an account on the PDC. We also want to migrate their old profile to their new account. Is it a case of just copying their old profile directory on their local PC to the roaming profile directory on the server? Or is there more to it than that?
Cheers
~paul~
Cheers
~paul~
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Windows NT User Profiles ·Drew Heywood
September 1997
Profile confusion occurs because NT can associate a given username with more than one profile. NT identifies a user account not by the username, but by a numeric security ID (SID). Each time NT creates a user account, it assigns the account a unique SID.
Now let's consider the following scenario. An administrator assigns Buster's computer to a workgroup, and Buster diligently creates a profile that suits him to a T. His company decides to implement NT Server, and the administrator assigns Buster a domain account, equipped with a roaming profile. Buster logs on to the domain and gets his default profile, not the beautiful profile he has labored over. What happened?
The problem is that Buster's workgroup and domain accounts, although they share a username, have different SIDs. As far as NT is concerned, they are distinct accounts with distinct profiles. If Buster logs on to the domain, he gets his domain profile; if he logs on to the workgroup, he gets his workgroup profile. When an administrator creates Buster's domain user account, the SID for the domain account is different from the SID for the workgroup account. Consequently, when Buster logs on to the domain for the first time, NT Server says, "Hmm, a new user. He doesn't have a profile, so he gets the default." NT initializes Buster's desktop using the local Default User profile.
Migrating NT Workstations to a New Domain ·Robert Schwendinger
·Michael Atalla
March 1999
describes a way to do something similar via login scripts.
Marc Minasi writes for them and he is regarded as one of the best NT authors. We use his books on NT Server and Workstation and he includes an excellent discussion of this and other topics.
We have had problems with profiles growing to many MBs in size. We are currently using System Policy Editor to prevent writing these Internet Explorer folders: Temporary Internet Files and History as well as Microsoft\Application Data\Outlook (by default Outlook was Journaling a small amount each time a user opened an Office document). http://www.i386.com/admin/policy/ discusses this also.