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Pooling user accounts. Is it advisable?


akiller

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Hi,

 

I'm currently evaluating DrivePool to figure out if it's for me. So far, things are looking very positive. The flexibility compared to Storage Spaces and the newly added folder placement feature are exactly what I need :).

 

One thing I would like to do however is to place my user accounts on a pool for redundancy. I know i can redirect documents and things easily within Windows, but this doesn't include AppData and all the other special folders.

 

My plan is to keep the administrator acount on my root install so if the pool's not available I can still login.

 

I created a user account, "pool" and used this to redirect it to the pool storage. Everything worked fine, I could login to the PC and my data was being written into the pool.

 

Can you see anything wrong with redirecting my individual user accounts using this method? Or is there a better way I shouild be aware of to do this?

 

(by the way, one issue I did have is I tried rebooting into safemode just to see what happened and as expected it didn't work as the user folder wasn't available. It logged me into a temporary profile and even after trying to reset the user account back to normal through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList it still wouldn't work even when back in normal Windows - I'm assumng Windows corrupted something as I restored the user's folder prior to going into the temp profile and it worked fine. Not to worry, I'll just disable temporary logon accounts via GPO so it can't happen again.)

 

 

Many thanks :).

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I would highly recommend against this. 

Specifically, because some of the user data is required by the recovery/repair features. And since that doesn't load DrivePool.... that data will not be accessible when you run the recovery stuff. And that means that you may not be able to log in to fix your system. 

 

While this may be more of an "edge case", it's something that is very important.

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Hi Chris,

 

I understand the risk when the pool is not available if all users were on it which is why I thought I'd leave the administrator account sat on my root install. If DrivePool was uninstalled, broke, or unavailable I would still be able to login as an administrator to fix things or login via the recovery console: I'd only temporarily lose access to my pooled user profiles which is fine.

 

With this in mind, from a DrivePool point of view my idea shouldn't necesarily cause anything to blow up should it? DrivePool clearly loads and is available before user login otherwise I wouldn't be able to login and I highly doubt anything would unnecessarily get corrupted using this approach but I'd like to double check with you guys first :).

 

Thanks.

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Well, as long as the user data for at least one administrator account is left on the system disk, then it should be okay. Just make sure that the account is not disabled, just in case you run into issues with the pool.

 

Aside from that, as long as real time duplication is enabled, I believe you should be fine.

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