Windows 10 Folder Redirection

Question

I have created a group policy to set up Folder Redirection. The client computers are all Windows 10 Enterprise. I followed these instructions.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/folder-redirection/deploy-folder-redirection

Additionally, I gave the "Domain Computers" and "Authenticated Users" groups read permissions on the GPO.

For the purpose of testing, my regular and elevated domain accounts are the only ones in the group. Also for testing, I'm only redirection "Desktop" and "Documents". When I logged into a Windows 10 computer, the redirection did not happen at all. GPResult shows that the GPO applied successfully, the settings just are not implemented. Eventually, I also created WMI filter for Windows 10. This by itself did not fix my issue. GPResult showed WMI filter as true, but still didn't apply the settings. Through more testing, I found that a newly imaged Windows 10 computer would redirect my folders properly. I decided to remove my profile from a computer that I had already logged onto and folder redirection was not working. After removing the profile and logging back in, the folder redirection works.

But I cannot do this manually for all the users and computers in our organization. I need to find the reason this is not working when a user has already established a profile.

A duplicate GPO with no WMI Filter is used for logging onto servers (all servers are Server 2012 R2). Redirection works as intended on Server 2012 R2. No need to remove existing profiles.

I followed troubleshooting steps from this site and found nothing helpful. Even the trace file showed no failures.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/folder-redirection/troubleshoot-user-profiles-events

Any assistance on what else I could do to troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated.

Solution

The problem ended up being a group policy loopback setting that was configured by someone else.

Comments

[user3271408]

"Grant the user exclusive rights", "Move the contents of df Desktop to the new location" and "Redirect the folder back to the local userprofile location when policy is removed" has been set since the beginning of my testing. I did try unchecking the "Grant the user exclusive rights" setting, but that didn't help. I have not tried the one that applies to XP and earlier since we're all Windows 10.

[user3271408]

Thank you for the response. It is not a permission issue because the same user gets redirected properly when a user profile does not exist on a computer prior to the policy taking affect. Even if that fixes the problem for one computer, I don't want to need to go to each computer for this.

[3D1T0R]

Any chance you could make this answer more specific and detailed?

[user3271408]

Here is a link about the setting: blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askds/2013/05/21/… When I would change a setting that should effect the user account that I was testing with, the group policy would process it but this loopback setting kept over writing my user account setting with the computer account setting.