I followed this guide: http://www.grouppolicy.biz/2012/07/how-to-set-users-home-folder-via-group-policy-in-windows-8/
for relocating the users' home folders using the local group policy editor. However it didn't work :( Then I also tried setting a path directly in lusrmgr but still no luck - neither with a network share nor with a local folder.

I need to 
- relocate all user folders and data including NTUSER.DAT to a network share on the local network 
- without caching (offline folders) and 
- not through folder redirection (which is not a complete relocation) 

So does anybody know what works on Windows 8.1 WITHOUT Active Directory domain?

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

To relocate user profile, you can refer to following article:

How to Relocate User Profiles to another Partition or Disk in Windows 8

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/4275-user-profiles-relocate-another-partition-disk.html

You can try to change the location as a network sharing folder.

Hope these could be helpful.