Roaming profiles what is

A very large profile can cause significant delays in your logon and logoff, can cause network congestion, and can become corrupted. Roaming profiles have a quota limit of MB. You will be warned when you go over quota and not allowed to log off until you are within quota.

In certain instances, over quota profiles can get uploaded to the server. If this happens, you will receive a warning by email. Failure to respond can result in your account being disabled. Profiles generally grow in size over time. The most common cause for going over quota is that Folder Redirection fails. When Folder Redirection fails, files that should be stored in your My Documents are saved into your roaming profile, instead of being redirected. DropBox is known to do this, among many others.

There are also other possibilities to numerous to list here. If you receive the error below it is because your profile has grown too big. We restrict the size of your profile to prevent it becoming too large which would cause logons to take a long time. You will not be able to log off the machine until your current profile size is reduced. Save all of your work and close all application windows or programs that are running.

Double click on the red circle with the white cross displayed in the Taskbar which is located at the bottom right hand side of your screen. This will bring up a list of files that are contained in the your profile see below.

Anything that interrupts the process while your profile is being uploaded to the server during logoff can potentially corrupt your profile.

Common causes are:. Often the only practical way of recovering from a corrupted profile is to delete the current profile and allow the system to create a new one. Designed to make it easy for a user to roam from one computer to another, Roaming Profiles provided a synchronization capability that copied user profile information and application settings from the local computer to a central Windows file server. This synchronization would occur upon login and logoff and worked perfectly if you worked for a very small company and sat within 50 feet of the file server.

Over the years the number of issues with Roaming Profiles continued to pile up. User profile sizes increased significantly as the size and number of files increased. In addition, corporate networks grew to encompass multiple locations around the globe, often without a local file server nearby.

Every time someone would log into their PC, the login process would reach out to the file server, that could be on the other side of the world, and download the user profile. Over the years there were a number of enhancements to Roaming Profiles, such as various forms of caching, but none fully solved the problems.

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