Are Roaming Profiles worth it for me

[newgeneral10]

I am in the process of building up my home network from scratch.  I will have one Windows PC as my main pc and a couple of linux (ubuntu) pcs/laptops around the house.  I also plan on building a freenas box, mainly as a media server.  I am a Computer Science student in college and I would like for my coding projects to be centrally located.  My question is, is it worth setting up roaming profiles on a freenas or should I just save everything in a documents folder on the nas?  If roaming profiles are the way to go, should I do it on the freenas box or build a dedicated ubuntu server?

[wilamu]

Roaming profiles suck. Just create yourself a shared drive and point your profile to that.

 

Map the drive with whatever letter you like, for this example it is U:

Set your My Documents and whatever else you want to the location of "U:\Documents" etc etc

 

Make the U: drive available offline.

 

WIN

[newgeneral10]

2 minutes ago, wilamu said:

Roaming profiles suck. Just create yourself a shared drive and point your profile to that.

 

Map the drive with whatever letter you like, for this example it is U:

Set your My Documents and whatever else you want to the location of "U:\Documents" etc etc

 

Make the U: drive available offline.

 

WIN

How would you make it available offline?  Would you do that through shadow copies?

[wilamu]

Just now, newgeneral10 said:

How would you make it available offline? 

 

Once the drive is mapped go to My Computer. Right-click the mapped drive and select "make available offline".

 

To be honest the offline availability would only be necessary if you were using a laptop and needed the files while away from the network.

 

If that's not required just use shared drives that you can access from all of your Win/Linux machines.

[newgeneral10]

Oh, that's a lot easier that I thought.  Thank you

[wilamu]

No problem I was supposed to give that a "thumbs up" by the way and accidentally clicked "funny" haha *face palm*

 

Good luck with your project.

[newgeneral10]

nah it was pretty funny haha

[XenosTech]

3 minutes ago, newgeneral10 said:

I am in the process of building up my home network from scratch.  I will have one Windows PC as my main pc and a couple of linux (ubuntu) pcs/laptops around the house.  I also plan on building a freenas box, mainly as a media server.  I am a Computer Science student in college and I would like for my coding projects to be centrally located.  My question is, is it worth setting up roaming profiles on a freenas or should I just save everything in a documents folder on the nas?  If roaming profiles are the way to go, should I do it on the freenas box or build a dedicated ubuntu server?

In my experience I'd say no to roaming profiles since they messy and corrupted real quick especially with in places that potentially have mixed operating systems. Better to use shares or folder redirection.

[wilamu]

Forgot to mention roaming profiles means you'd have to set up an active directory server etc etc.

[Mikensan]

I also second folder redirection instead of roaming profiles. You might lose settings for some applications like Outlook - so when you run them you may have to go through the wizard when you go from computer to computer. But once you've set it up on each computer (how many can there be at home?) not a big deal.

[leadeater]

Yep use folder redirection and offline files, roaming profiles aren't that useful.

[srfortune]

Folder redirection works great until users start to sync Itunes libraries or PST files ... RIP storage