#BROKEN REDIRECTOR MANUAL#
#BROKEN REDIRECTOR WINDOWS 8.1#
#BROKEN REDIRECTOR SERIES#
#BROKEN REDIRECTOR WINDOWS#

#BROKEN REDIRECTOR WINDOWS#

The point being here that you should not use Windows File Explorer as an admin tool. You get this when looking at your home directories in Explorer: Redirecting the Documents folder to the root of the home directory is logical. Redirecting Documents to the Home Directory Root One thing that is not immediately obvious but that can be deduced from the User Shell Folders image above: when you redirect AppData (the merits of which are highly debatable) you are also redirecting: Group Policy prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot.

#BROKEN REDIRECTOR MANUAL#

In any case you can only redirect to drive letters using the manual method (writing directly to the registry). It may work in your setup – today – but any configuration change may break that. There is no guarantee that the home drive is mapped before folder redirection kicks in. The Windows user logon is a very complex process with many things happening in parallel. Redirecting to Drive LettersĪs tempting as it may be to simply redirect to H: (or whatever the home drive is in your organization): Do not do it. It is important to note that this file moving happens synchronously during user logon and may increase the total logon duration significantly. Existing files can be moved to the new location when a folder’s target is changed and back to the original location in the user profile when the policy is removed. Optionally different targets can be specified per user group. Using this method only 13 folders can be redirected, but that is typically sufficient. The official way to redirect folders is to use the corresponding Group Policy CSE, to be found at User Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Folder Redirection: But it does not move existing data around when you change a folder’s target.

#BROKEN REDIRECTOR WINDOWS 8.1#

It allows for the redirection of all folders represented in the User Shell Folders key (21 on Windows 8.1 with Update). Manual redirection has the smallest possible logon duration overhead – after all, only a few registry values need to be set. This absolutely works fine – I have seen it in very large production environments – but it is not 100% clear if it is supported by Microsoft. If you implement folder redirection by changing the values of the User Shell Folders key directly you are redirecting manually. That is what is at the core of folder redirection. History, while others like the Desktop have been changed to point to a file server. In the image above some folders point to their default location within the user profile, e.g. It looks up a folder’s target in the User Shell Folders registry key: That is where the API function SHGetKnownFolderPath comes in. The latter is a container in the file system.Īpplications that want to work with (virtual) folders like Documents need a way to find the physical directory a folder maps to. There is a – subtle – difference between a folder and a directory: the former is a virtual container in the namespace of the shell. There is a reason folder redirection got the name is has and not, for example, directory redirection.

#BROKEN REDIRECTOR SERIES#

This series of articles is about what can go wrong, where folder redirection fails and how that affects end user experience. Interestingly that is not the case.Įverybody uses folder redirection but nobody fully understands the consequences. Given these circumstances, one would assume that use cases and caveats have been fully understood for at least a decade and that people generally agree on the DOs and DON’Ts. The folder redirection technology has been a part of Windows more or less forever, and it solves an important problem: quickly setting up user sessions on stateless machines. Working in the SBC/VDI space without stumbling across folder redirection is about as easy as travelling from Europe to the US as an IP packet without going through a Cisco router. Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Why Even Talk About Folder Redirection – in 2014!?!.Part three: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Start Menu Search.Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch.This is the first in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass.

Broken redirector