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Exclaiming your space

Posted on 8 Feb 2008 at 15:25

Jon Honeyball sorts out the mess in his mailbox and fuels the windows release date rumours, while David Moss looks at Vista's redirection capabilities.

Desktop

My Documents/My Pictures

Start Menu

Application Data

Of these, Desktop and My Documents were regularly redirected, with Application Data less so, and Start Menu almost never, mainly because you could redirect it only to a shared location. Under Vista, there's been a significant change both in what can be redirected and also in how that redirection works. Each user's Start Menu, for example, can now be redirected to a separate location.

The old Application Data redirection was a pain because it never separated user data from system data. Now, Vista's new AppData redirection folder has three subfolders to separate this data and make it easy to see what's what. These three subfolders are called Local, LocalLow and Roaming. Without going into these in any depth, think of Local as being equivalent to the XP Application Data folder, and Local and LocalLow as being used for data that's machine-specific, while Roaming is a wholly new folder that holds all that application data that needs to roam with the user. This is a much smaller subset of the total data than used to be the case with Application Data redirection, which is why it was less than popular with admins.

The redirection folder list under Vista includes the following (note that there are partial name changes for some items - Documents in Vista is the same as My Documents in XP):

Desktop

Documents

Start Menu

AppData

Contacts

Downloads

Favorites

Links

Music

Pictures

Saved Games

Searches

Videos

You have to wonder just how loud the user base was crying out to be able to redirect Saved Games, but never mind it will be first on my list from now on. Interestingly, under Windows XP, if a user deleted a file it remained in the Recycle Bin on the local machine, whereas under Vista the Recycle Bin is part of the user's profile and lives there in a hidden folder.

As with Windows XP, there are basically two ways to redirect: lump everyone together in a single shared location, or redirect to specific locations based on user group membership. Note that there's a new Vista setting called "Follow the Documents folder", which you can apply to music, pictures and video.

Once you've chosen your target folder, make sure you click on the Settings tab, since you'll discover there's a new checkbox under Vista. In the Settings tab, you can decide whether users have exclusive rights to their documents, or whether you want to enable it so that admins can also look in their folders.

That will be a company policy decision, of course, but this isn't something you can easily apply retrospectively. If you want your admins to be able to access user files without having to force their way in by taking ownership of the folders, you really need to enable this setting now.

The next setting down, which you'll invariably leave checked, is "Move the contents of Documents to the new location". This ensures any files the user created before folder redirection was set up are moved to the new target folder. Be aware if a user has created files with the same name in local profiles on different systems, as when you implement redirection only the latest file will be placed in the target folder.

Now, at this point, you'll probably be wondering what happens to the XP redirection folders - I know I was. I was also wondering what would happen on a mixed-mode server network. Not everybody is running just one type of Windows server. The answer lies in the next checkbox, and it's one that you'll only see if you're doing the setting up from a Vista box. The checkbox label reads: "Also apply redirection policy to Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems". Opt for this and your redirection group policy will now be understood by those operating systems, as opposed to a group policy that only works with Vista. One of the noticeable changes will be that the redirected Documents folder will become named My Documents to bring it into line with the older operating systems (obviously, you can choose any name you like, but it's easier to go with the defaults). One thing this will affect is that if you deploy this setting you won't be able to redirect the music and video folders to specific locations; they'll follow the Documents folder as they did under XP. The Pictures folder can still be redirected to a different location.