Good Afternoon All - I am writing this post to get opinions on which method would be best to backup user specific data in the below scenario. Do you think one of the two ideas listed are best or do you have a different suggestion? The environment in question has about 500 workstation - mostly Windows 7. Users have redirected home folders and are supposed to save their work there, to a mapped drive, or other network location - but obviously some do not. Currently, if a computer dies, then they loose any information they had in a local location. Idea #1 - USMT Script A script has been written which may be run on workstations to start a USMT command. This command backs up all user data and copy it to a networked location. Biggest Pro is that it can copy data outside of the profile. Biggest con is getting it to run / deploy on each workstation at the correct time and work correctly. Idea #2 - Roaming Profiles Roaming Profiles could be set up to copy any user data to a networked location. File and folders could be included / excluded as needed. Biggest Pro is that it was designed for this type of purpose. Biggest Con is managing users who "float" between physical (WAN connected) locations. Note: I actually have a workaround solution for the WAN location, but it would require that a bit of functionality would be lost. So... What do you think? Thanks!Ben K.

As you have already indicated each solution has its Pro's and Con's. I would suggest you to go with roaming profiles if you have strong n/w backbone infra as well as enough storage space to store the user data.A UNIVERSE without WINDOWS is CHAOS ! This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees and confers no rights. About Me ?

Me too I suggest the roaming profile solution. More clean than using special script and such. Like Santosh's told, all method got pro and con. I do not suggest special script. Redirect all folder like you did, and tell your user what to do to not loose anything. Really better than special script. Educating your user is a good path, but take time, a lot, lot and lot of time. Redirecting the Desktop and My documents will get almost everything. With a exchange with that the datastore will be central. I just suggest that, because if they save something locally, even the roaming will not get the data. With the script you can backup all the data, but it can be hard to manage, for me I do that in a cloud environment and sometime when the computer hang, the last writter win, so I loosed some data that way. MCP | MCTS 70-236: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring

learned a lot, thank you.

Thanks Guys - I really appreciate your thoughts and will pass them on. If anyone thinks of anything else, please let me know - Thanks!Ben K.

Hi, I would like to confirm what is the current situation? If there is anything that I can do for you, please do not hesitate to let me know, and I will be happy to help. Regards, Arthur Li TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedback here.Arthur Li TechNet Community Support