Profile Size

Imagine you need to determine the size of a directory, but you do not have access to it and cannot change the permissions, either. Such a situation is common with Windows user profiles. This article shows how to deal with it.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the problems inherent to roaming user profiles is that they are copied to the local computer during logon. That takes time. Hence the motivation to limit the size of user profiles. One way of doing that is to put a quota on them, another one is folder redirection. Although widely used, redirection has its problems; problems so grave that Shawn Bass started to campaign against using folder redirection altogether. In this article I describe why Shawn despises redirection, which alternatives are available now what we can hope for in the future.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the constants in the Windows universe is the knowledge that user profiles increase in size over time. They tend to accumulate all kinds of junk and become bloated which is especially cumbersome in the case of roaming profiles because all that “weight” is copied across the network time and again, slowing down the logon process.