Local Profiles the easy way.

Active Directory at SFU has been designed to use Roaming Profiles.  This is, for many administrators, the easiest way to automatically back up the user's data.  As such, it has a real benefit even if a user only works at a single machine.

When a user works at multiple machines, roaming profiles become even more attractive.

And should a machine fail  (nah, hard drives never crash, do they ?), getting the user back up and running when using roaming profiles is a very simple task.

However, there are occasions when a local profile is called for (like in the case of a Notebook), and there is a Group Policy setting to do exactly that.  Under

    Computer Configuration
        Administrative Templates
            System/User Profiles

is the setting

    Only allow local user profiles

Enable this setting and all users of the machine will have a local profile, just as if they were never a member of AD in the first place.

The question still remains, though, how to back up the user's data.

By my convention, a roaming profile user has their profile stored on \\server\profiles\username and their "home" directory set to U: on \\server\users\username.  Roaming profile users have the Eudora application installed locally, but with the mailboxes, settings and attachments stored on the fileserver under U:\Eudora.  (Local profile users obviously have everything installed locally)

Also on U: is a folder named Documents.  MSOffice is configured -by GPO- to save to U:\Documents and users are strongly encouraged to save everything else there as well.

Here's (excerpts from) a pair of scripts (logon and logoff) that I use to backup a local profile user.  Generally, things are stored in the same locations as they would be if they were a roaming profile user.  As such, if they happen to sit down at a machine configured for roaming profiles, they will still be able to work with the same files are they would at their "local profile" machine.
 

LOGON.CMD

net use p: \\acs_server.ucs.sfu.ca\software
net use u: \\acs_server.ucs.sfu.ca\users\%username%
net use t: \\acs_server.ucs.sfu.ca\profiles\%username%
 

LOGOFF.CMD

p:\robocopy "%appdata%\QUALCOMM\EUDORA" u:\EUDORA /S /E /FFT /NFL /NDL /XD Embedded /XD Eudpriv
p:\robocopy "%appdata%\microsoft" "t:\application data\microsoft" /S /E /FFT /NFL /NDL /XD Qualcomm
p:\robocopy "%userprofile%\desktop"  t:\desktop /S /E /FFT /NFL /NDL
p:\robocopy "%userprofile%\my documents" u:\DOCUMENTS /S /E /FFT /NFL /NDL
 

Notes:

1. ROBOCOPY is pretty cool, and can be viewed as a much better XCOPY.  Download it here.

2. XCOPY with the /A or /M parameter is not as useful any more as it once was.  The problem is that when Windows looks at a (graphics) file to either update the folder icon or to give a thumbnail display, it also resets the archive bit.  As such, graphics files are copied every single time the XCOPY command is run, if they've changed or not !