Have you ever been at your or in your home network and experienced a system failure. If you are shaking your head right now or cringing from the flashback, you know the pains that can come with this disaster. The truth is that most people, including system administrators do not account for this scenario. They assume that users will implicitly work with business data located in shared locations (ie. network drives, SAN storage). Real-life experience will tell you that most users prefer to copy these files locally to work. This can lead to data loss as well as business downtime in worst-case situation.

Well I have a solution for you to mitigate this almost inevitable issue of hardware, software system failures. This phenomenon (..a bit of an exaggeration) is called Folder Redirection. This has been available in your Windows Server operating systems for years, back to the days of good 'ol Server 2000 and XP and Vista built on this concept. The principle behind it is that you select certain folders to be stored on the server in addition to the users profile making users' data accessible from any workstation they log on to. For example, the beloved 'My Documents', will be saved on the server instead of the user's local machine hard drive.

Here are a few reasons to use folder redirection in your environment:

User data availability - user files will always be available in the same place

Disaster Recovery - Storing user data on the server leverages routine backups. This ensures that files will be available in the event of a recovery scenario

Note: Governing what types of files users store on company computers is essential here. It is definitely an item to plan and execute prior to implementation of the aforementioned policies.

Folder redirection is handled by Group Policy. This ensures that upon login, the users redirected folders contain the correct data.

How to configure folder redirection:

1.       Create a new Group Policy Object (GPO) called 'Folder Redirection'. 

2.       Expand the User Configuration Node.

3.       Expand Windows Settings.

4.       Expand Folder Redirection.

5.       Choose the folder you wish to redirect from the listing -> Right-click ->   Properties.

6.       On the Folder tab from the Properties dialog box -> Select the setting for             redirection from the list. The options are as follows:

Not configured: Redirection will not occur on this folder. This is the default selection.

Basic: Redirect everyone’s folder to the same location. You can configure the target options associated with this selection. These settings tell Windows where to put the redirected data.

Create a folder for each user under this root path: This is the default.

Redirect to the following location: Places all redirected data in the folder at the destination path specified.

Redirect to the local user profile folder: This will redirect the users’ data back to their local user profile location.

Advanced: Specify locations for various user groups. This allows redirection locations to be different based on a user’s group membership. This option will require you to add security groups and paths for folder redirection -- This is outside of the scope of this hub and will be described in another hub. 

7.       Once the destination choices are made, enter the network share path where the data will be redirected (ie. \\servername\share)

8.       Use additional settings regarding exclusive rights to redirected content and the handling of existing content in the original location that can be found on the Settings tab of the Properties dialog box.

9.       Click OK.

Configure the other folders to be redirected as needed.

Presto, you can now test your updated settings and confirm that you can access all data from any workstation in your network. Be proud of yourself! You have now made your network more redundant and resilient.