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redirect my music folder in roaming profile

Greetings,

I have a small office with a win 2003 domain. I am using roaming profiles and I have my documents redirected to a separate location. However my music is still in the user profile and for some users that is getting too large. I would like to manage this by putting their my music folder on their local machines.

The thing is that I did this a couple of months ago and it seems like now the my music folder in a users profile folder has returned.

So I looked at this experts exchange question: 21811952 - it talks about making a junction which is a good idea however my question is that I want to make sure that the my music folder does not get copied to the server profile folder for a given user.

Thanks for any insight into this issue.

Best regards, Sky

Schuyler Kuhl

ASKER

the main thing I want to do is prevent my music from syncronizing back to the server

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Hypercat (Deb)

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Schuyler Kuhl

ASKER

Thanks very much, this is a very good solution. I only had a problem with two users music folders and they were both using itunes so I just moved their music to a folder on their local machines and then re-set up their itunes. However this is also an issue with the my pictures folder so I am going to implement this solution for that folder as well.

Is there a problem if there is existing files in those folders that you exclude? If there are already pictures in my pictures, i assume that they will stop syncronizing and then I can just delete the files from the server location.

The thing I am wondering about is that I have their my documents folder redirected to another location, out of the profile folder, so would it be smart to find a way to have the my music and my pictures to also go to this location? Perhaps by creating a junction from the my ... folder in the profile folder to the redirected location?

I wouldn't mind being able to back up that data, but I guess it is not critical. I wonder what the best practice in this case is?

Thank you very much for this help.

Best regards,

Sky

Hypercat (Deb)

My experience is that once the folder is no longer set to synchronize, you also do have to delete it in the actual roaming profile folder on the server. It won't be synchronizing, but it will not actually be deleted automatically. As far as the folder redirection, all of the subfolders of the My Documents folder should be following the My Documents redirection by default. If those other folders are not subfolders of My Documents, then there's no way to redirect them automatically through group policies. You would have to do this through manually creating a shortcut or junction point as you described to a location on the server. The good (?) news is that with Vista, you can have more granular control over these folders through group policies. The bad news is that with Vista, the whole profile folder organization is completely different and converting over is a bit of a pain.