Is Users Dopbox filling your Servers Profile Hard Drive ? How to Exclude accross a windows domain !

Today i came accross an issue where our File Server partition for User Profiles became 99% full.

As a server admin this is a problem, but we can't just go around deleting stuff we don't like the look of, and rather than talking to 100+ users i decided to use "TreeSize" to show me what are the largest folders and if there are any commonalities.

The answer was Dropbox !

Nearly every user has a Dropbox folder under the roaming profile folder the smallest was about 1gb, and the some were even 20gb !!!

So in order to keep the file server healthy i created another GPO to go along side the roaming profile & folder re-direction on Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard.

Options

In the case we want to exclude Dropbox content from the roaming part of a user profile we actually have two options (i chose option 1)

1. Make the folder “local” through group policy, we can exclude some folders from the roaming part of a folder GPO. Logon and logoff will become faster and the Dropbox content just stays on the system and isn’t synced with the profile’s central copy at the profile server.

2. Move the folder through the Dropbox GUI to a location under a local folder (for example %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local, which is excluded from the roaming part of a profile by default). This has the same result as the previous option, but is only achieved by actually working on the desktop itself which is very time consuming.

Option 2 example: http://www.techgainer.com/change-dropbox-default-folder-location-windows/

 

Solution

Exclude Folders from Roaming Profiles

Edit the GPO to exclude specific folders in roaming profiles:

1. Click Start, point to
   Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.
2. In the console tree, right-click your domain, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Group Policy tab, click the GPO that you want to work with, and then click Edit.
4. Under User Configuration, expand
   Administrative Templates, expand System, and then click User Profiles.
5. In the Setting list, double-click
   Exclude directories in roaming profile, and then click
   Enabled.
6. In the Prevent the following directories from roaming with the profile box, type Dropbox.
7. When you are finished not including folders from roaming profiles, click OK.
8. Quit the Group Policy snap-in, click
9. Now assign your new GPO to the correct User OU in question.

Problem Solved !