Personal IT Experiences

Moving a large group of terminal server user home folders from one clustered hard drive share to another on a SAN. If you try to manually copy or “move” the home folders, the NTFS permissions on the new home folders are not retained and users are not able to access their directories on the new hard drive share properly.

Solved by:
Creating a backup of the original home directories using ntbackup.exe and then restoring them on the new hard drive share. The original NTFS permissions are retained for all files and folders.

After restoring the home folders to the new location, return to the old home drive share and delete the previous home folders.

If you have difficulty deleting folders and files from the old home drive share because of errors like this “Cannot delete file: Access is denied”, then use a utility like Unlocker. It’s a free delete utility and works quite well.

Don’t forget to update the terminal server home folder location in each user’s profile. Use ADModify.net for bulk account changes like this.