Recently a user complained at my desk about his logon times. When logging on to a new pc, he often had to wait 15 minutes before he got his desktop in front of him.
Typically, this means A) a slow network or B) an enormous profile.
In this case, B was the case.
Some investigation pointed out the Dropbox folder to be 14GB (and growing!). To avoid these kinds of problems, it’s best to exclude such directories from roaming to the network by using a group policy.
In the GPO, go to User Configuration, Administrative Templates, System, User Profiles.
Enable the policy Exclude directories in roaming profile
In the text file, type all folders you want to exclude, separated by a semi-column ( ; )
Like: SkyDrive;Dropbox
To check whether you have users with a large roaming profile in your environment (and therefor prevent these kind of problems), you’d best use TreeSize or a Powershell script that calculates the disk space (examples:http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/05/25/getting-directory-sizes-in-powershell.aspx ) and run it on your profile server.
Excluding specific folders will help you in shortening logon times, reducing network traffic, and reducing storage and backup space requirements
Is it also recommended to exclude AppData\Roaming\Dropbox? After a fresh installation of Dropbox, this folder is about 75 MB in size.
Bye,
Hi Kurt,
that really depends on the environment you work in. In a high-speed internal network but with slow internet access, you could choose to roam your DropBox. This will save you internet traffic. Especially in an environment where users do not have a primary computer to work on.
However, most organizations nowadays have a sufficient internet connection to sync DropBox accounts without causing issues for other users. If users often work on the same pc, the local profile with DropBox files remains on the pc. I’d then advise to NOT roam the DropBox folder.
Does this need to be applied to computers or just users?