Users are accustomed to saving documents, pictures, and more into their Documents
or My Documents
folder, because that is what they do at home. When working on an office computer at their job, the natural tendency is to save right into the local Documents
folder as well. This is generally not desired behavior because backing up everyone's documents folders individually would be an administrative nightmare. So the common resolution to this problem is to provide everyone with mapped network drives and train users to save documents into these mapped drives. This is good in theory, but difficult to execute in practice. As long as users still have the capability to save documents into their local My Documents
folder, there is a good chance that they will save at least some things in there, probably without realizing it.
This recipe is a quick Group Policy change that can be made so that the My Documents
folders on your domain joined computers get redirected onto a network share. This way, if users do save a document into My Documents
, that document gets written over to the file server where you have directed them.
To redirect the My Documents
folders via Group Policy, follow these steps:
Documents
folder to be directed to. I am going to use a share that I have created on our file server. Mine will look like this: \file1users
.
Documents
folder.Documents
folder. We are just creating something here in local Documents
so that we can see where it is actually being stored.Users
directory that we specified. We now have a folder in there with my username, and inside that folder is a Documents
folder that contains the new text document that I just created and stored inside the local My Documents
on my client computer!
Redirecting everyone's My Documents
to be automatically stored on a centralized file server is an easy change with Group Policy. You could even combine this configuration with another that maps a network drive, then simply specify the drive letter in under your Document Redirection setting rather than typing out a UNC that could potentially change in the future. However you decide to configure it in your environment, I guarantee that using this setting will result in more centralized administration of your data and fewer lost files for your users.
18.221.18.145