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Storing user profiles, part 2

User profiles can be stored in various network locations for optimum efficiency. Here are few more tips to keep in mind for storage locations:

Server-based or roaming user profiles should never be stored in the root level of a user's home folder. Because every file in the user profile folder is copied over the network for server-based user profiles, storing server-based user profiles in a user's home folder can result in very long logon times. For this reason, server-based user profiles should be stored in dedicated user profile folders. However, this dedicated folder can be a subfolder of the home folder or of some other user folder. Unfortunately, you can't use the %username% environment variable for the user profile path because %username% doesn't expand when followed by additional text (as in \\Servername\Sharename\%username%\profile).

A good practice is to place server-based user profiles on NTFS-formatted partitions. You can then use Windows NT security features to prevent users from deleting mandatory profiles or other users' roaming profiles.

Mandatory user profile paths shouldn't point to the folder that stores the local user profile because user profile changes are always cached locally. If you set a mandatory user profile path to the local profile folder, user profile changes made by the user will be saved whenever the user logs off. For example, if you store User1's mandatory profile locally in the \\User1\Winnt\Profiles\User1 folder, the user's profile will always be overwritten, even if it has the .man file extension. To avoid this problem, store mandatory user profiles on a server or in a folder on the local computer other than the Windows NT profiles folder (typically named C:\Winnt\Profiles).