# Roaming Profiles & Home Folders



## p0ng0 (Sep 15, 2007)

Hey Guys,

I've been trying to write up an explanation of Roaming Profiles and Home Folders in the simplest form, but clearly i'm struggling, lol. 

Can anybody check what i've wrote and make any corrections, but also, most importantly, make it as clear and simple as possible?

Here's what i've got so far:

Roaming Profiles
Roaming profiles speak for themselves. 
Firstly, a profile is a file, or rather a bunch of files that make up your personalised computer settings: your desktop wallpaper; your files stored in My Documents; your icons and shortcuts along with everything else that you customise with your computer is stored in your profile.

A roaming profile is a profile that roams around the network. A roaming profile allows you to access your profile from any computer within the network. No matter which computer you sit at, your desktop will appear to be the same every time. Your wallpaper, your documents and all other personalised items will appear on any computer you log on with  ideal for hot-desk environments. 

Home Folders
A Home folder is a virtual drive personal to you. Your home folder stores all your files and folders that you store on your profile. A home folder appears in My Computer as your personal drive. Here, you can store all your documents.

Why should you consider a home folder when using a roaming profile?

Local profiles are those stored on your local hard disk drive. Roaming profiles are stored centrally on a file server. Each time you load your roaming profile on a computer, it firstly looks for a copy of your profile, locally. If a copy is not present, or is out of date, it will download your profile from the server. So, if youve already logged into a specific computer with your profile previously, it will read from that (cached) copy. If your profile is over 2GB, it could take 20 minutes to download from the server, as its not had this profile before. 

Because Home folders are not loaded as you login, your documents will not be downloaded automatically. Instead, a drive with your name on will appear in My Computer, which contains all your documents and saved files. You can browse these, rather than download them.


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## Techgeek07 (Apr 27, 2007)

I had to explain this in many different ways to many different people. I found it best to just say, "since you need your information at many computers, this will bring it with you. However, it can only take so much information at once, so it's best to keep what you need at the moment with you, and the rest on the "shared drives".


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