As already written in the "Windows folder redirection not working ... sometimes" article we are making use of the Windows folder redirection group policies to redirect folders like "Documents", "Desktop" and "Favorites" to a server share in order to save space on the local harddisks/SSDs and of course make that data available to the user no matter what workstations he logs onto. For the redirection we use the environment variable %HOMESHARE% which basically contains the value of the AD field "HomeDirectory".
Until now the folder structure we were using for the home directories was a little odd. The home directories resided in "\\server\users\home\<department>\<accountname>" which means that whenever a user changes department his/her entire home directory had to be moved to a new location.
The server department started moving the first departments' users' home directories to a new structure (and updated the "homedirectory" value in the AD for the affected users accordingly). The new locations for the home directories are five DFSs under "\\server\users\home0[1-5]\<accountname>" hosted on a NetApp server. The split into "home01" to "home05" is done so that they do not have to restore a giant 10TB share and instead only have to deal with smaller 2TB portions when things go south.
And even though the people in charge claimed that they tested everything thoroughly things did go south when they migrated the home directories of the first hundred or so users ...
