Comments on: Map Windows My Documents Folder to Network Drive

By: William Pate

William Pate — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:42:50 +0000

You can accomplish this with folder redirection through Group Policy. If you are using Active Directory 2003 with WIN XP or Vista clients then load Group Policy Object Editor on one of your domain controllers. Create a new group policy and under User Configuration you will find a folder called WIndows Settings. Under Windows Settings there is a folder called Folder Redirection right click on this folder and select properties. At this point you are going to need a server share to point the my documents folder to. I also recommend redirecting the Desktop. If you right click on my documents and go to properties you can chooose “Basic – Redirect everyone’s folder to the same location”. Under Target folder location I choose Create a folder for each user under the root path. Under root path type in the path to your share ex. \\server\share
Under the settings tab I recommend making sure Grant the user exclusive rights to my documents is checked and Move the contents of my documents folder to the new location is checked. You MUST be careful though because once you apply this policy to users it could take a significant amount of time when they go to login. You will get the applying computer settings screen for a long time sometimes and basically what is happening is the server is copying the users my documents folder to the server. You probably want to pick someone you know well to try this out on at first. Then I suggest moving the users over to the new policy one at a time…and schedule the move with them for the end of the day. Have them logoff then move their user account into the new OU with the policy and have them log back in. This way if it takes an hour for their my documents to copy it will do it while they are at home….good luck.

By: Douwe

Douwe — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:36:55 +0000

I tried all above solutions but nothing worked.
Log in as a normal user, redirect ‘My Documents” to the mapped drive of the users personal folder. You can also change more settings e.g desktop settings. Go to ‘My computer’ and disconnect the mapped drive of the users homedirectory. Now login as administrator, delete all files in the (hidden) folder for default user and copy all files from the folder of the user you first logged in as to the folder of the default user.

By: Adamc

Adamc — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:24:29 +0000

HELP!!!!
I am school tech director and and using windows server 2008 with active directory. All users have storage on the server but when a user saves to my documents, it saves to the local computer. How can I map my documents to save to user’s folder on the server. I have 140 users to worry about so the easier the better.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:55:01 +0000

I am looking to implement something like this in our office, we are using AD and have several network shares.

I want each person to have their own personal H:\ drive on the network, something like \\server\home\$user that is only accessible to the individual user (and admins). I also want the My Documents folder mapped to this location as well, it needs to be done silently (without user intervention) and automatically at logon.

By: steve weeps

steve weeps — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:49:18 +0000

Do changes to the registry with regini.exe require administrator priviledges on the workstation?

By: Pim Messelink

Pim Messelink — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:32:42 +0000

You don’t have to use VB, you can use regini:

1) create a file somewhere where your users can read it named reg.txt with these lines for instance:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
Personal = REG_EXPAND_SZ U:\Documents
My Pictures = REG_SZ U:\Documents\My Pictures

2) add a line to your logon script (for instance logon.cmd in \\server\netlogon):

regini \\server\netlogon\reg.txt

And you should be good to go.

By: chian yi

chian yi — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:52:01 +0000

thanks very much. i finally find an answer.

By: curtis

curtis — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:04:00 +0000

You’ll need a VBS script to map the My Documents to the relevant network volume. Something like this:

Dim WSHShell
Set WSHShell = CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)
WSHShell.RegWrite “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal”, “P:\”
WSHShell.RegWrite “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\My Pictures”, “P:\”

Then call the script in your batch file set to run on user login.

By: rick davis

rick davis — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:21:05 +0000

After reading more about net use I’m not sure that this is the command I need. The network volume is already mounted automatically at login. The only thing I want to try to do is redirect the My Documents, My Music etc folders to the relevant folders in the OS X home directory, Documents, Music, Pictures and Movies. So can a script create symbolic links for the user as they login?

Thanks again.

Rick Davis

By: rick davis

rick davis — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:13:41 +0000

I am a non-windows user administering an OS X server with some windows xp clients. User home directory is on the OS X server. I would like to set a script to run that would map the winxp users “My Documents”, “My Music” etc files to the relevant file in the network home directory. Any of you experts willing to share a script?

Thanks and have a great day.