Roaming Profile, Folder Redirection, Home Folders - Which One to Use When?

Roaming Profile

A profile which roams around with the user is a Roaming Profile (Ofcourse). Its always good to get the same settings that we have (Wallpaper/Start Menu/Fav) etc... So Roaming Profile makes sure that on which so ever machine you logs on, you will get the same settings

The advantages of a Roaming Profile are:

- User gets the same settings where ever he/she logs on

- In case the client machine goes down, the copy of the profile is always on the server. So instead of just a single copy of the profile, user will now have a cache local copy of the profile and the actual profile on the server as well 

The disadvantages of using a Roaming Profile are:

- Increase in logon time (delay in logon)
- Users will get a Temp Profile is the network is not available

Folder Redirection

You might have seen cases where administrators have configured Folder Redirection along with Roaming Profile

Why?

The simple reason behind this would be that the redirected folders does NOT sync at logon. So no logon delay which use to be in case of Roaming Profiles

(Although you can configure them to get sync at logon as well using Offline Files and Group Policy)

Home Drive

Have you seen cases where administrators have configured "Roaming Profiles" + "Folder Redirection" and "Home Folders"

Strange na... I know... :)

The most important reason behind this is to give a "Mapped Drive" to the users so that they can store some of their "Critical Data" in their mapped drive instead of storing all the data in their roaming profile or on their redirected folder