Recently we are seeing an increased number of issues with user's homeshare.
We have configured folder redirection to direct 9 profile folders (Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Videos) to %HOMESHARE%\foldername.
That's all the configuration we did.
This seemed to work fine for over a year, but now users are reporting one of the below issues rather frequently.
- When trying to access their home drive (P:) they get an error message that P: is unavailable.
- When trying to open a file that has just been saved, the file is not visible in explorer. (In this case refreshing the Explorer window sometimes works. Or starting a new sync may solve it as well.)
- When accessing the home share, not all files and folders are visible. Only a couple of redirected folders are visible. Any other manually created file or folder is not listed. (Rerunning a sync may solve this sometimes.)
The home folder is configured as \\servername\Home\%USERNAME%.
We have tested a few things already.
- Disabling Offline Files, to force to work online > Does not seem to work. Issue remains, P: unavailable...
- Added a *.tmp sync exclusion as .pst-files were initially the cause of sync errors > Saving files was no longer possible in redirected folders, so we had to remove this setting.
- Changed the folder redirection policy to point to a different share than the home folder and clearing the offline file cache > Issue remained, P: unavailable or not showing all files
Only when we also moved the user's home folder to a different share, the issue went away. (The 2 new shares for redirected folders and home folder have caching disabled. The original Home share has caching enabled.)
It would be great if there was a server side solution (GPO?) to this issue.
Splitting the redirected folders and home folder and moving them to a new location is not something we're aching to do...