asked on

Windows 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services Farm profiles - need to move to new share

We currently have a 2 server Windows 2008 R2 RDS Farm. We also have roaming profiles stored on a server share. We cannot see most of the profiles because of right issues. We use Windows Backup to back them up and are wanting to move those profiles to a new server share. It seems as easy as recovering them to the new server share, maintaining the ACL structure and changing the GPO to have Remote Desktop Services look at the new server for the profiles instead of the old server.

Am I missing anything or should it be as easy as that? I know I'm overthinking it, but wanted to be sure.
Thanks for any help!

Mahesh

If your profiles are not much customized, then instead of moving them, just point users to new profile share on new server and allow Windows to simply recreate them on the new server. This Will take a bit longer to log on and off the first time while it creates the new roaming profile on the new server.

However if you want to move profiles anyhow,
Then create new share on target server, normally while creating new share for roaming profiles, keep everyone full control share and lets not touch NTFS part,
Then Use robocopy with the /COPYALL switch to copy the NTFS permissions as well as the files from each profile.
Ex:
C:\Robocopy.exe "E:\Profiles" "\\NEWSERVER\profiles" /r:10 /COPYALL /E /ZB /LOG:C:\Robocopy_Profiles.log
If data size is large, I mean if you can't copy all data within off hours, then you need to run above command multiple times to copy any incremental changes before final cutover (robocopy always run in incremental mode only)
Once than is done, check for test user by changing profile path if he gets the same roaming profile on new server, if that succeeds then point all users to new roaming profile share via user properties or via GPO

However if you have permissions issue during copy process via robocopy because of roaming profile behavior, you need to take ownership of roaming profile share followed by grating your admin ID full control before you use robocopy
Use Subinacl to take folder ownership followed by full control perms without destroying other permissions
You can see below article for that:
https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/17526/Windows-File-Server-Folder-ownership-problems-and-resolution.html

you might want to add administrators group full control via GPO on new profile server to handle future migration scenarios
The GPO setting can be found under computer configuration\administrative templates\system\user profiles as "add the administrators security group to roaming user profiles"
The GPO needs to be placed on OU containing new profile server before any user starts logging on new profile server

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

sdrexel

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

sdrexel

ASKER

It was the solution.