17 replies to this topic

[Mortis]

I've just set up a Vail installation, and added users.
Is there, like in the old version of Windows Home Server, a personal folder for each user to store files in?

~ Mortis

[Drashna Jaelre (WGS)]

Nope. It was removed because apparently "no one uses it" from the data collected.... And yes, I call BS on this.

[spile]

Drashna Jaelre (WGS), on 17 November 2010 - 07:38 AM, said:

Nope. It was removed because apparently "no one uses it" from the data collected.... And yes, I call BS on this.

Yipes I never realised that. Willl be sticking with v1 in that case.

[Mortis]

No one uses it? That i must call BS! That's one of the most useful things i used in WHS!
I guess i gotta set up a domain-controller and make personal folders the hard way.

~ Mortis

[Drashna Jaelre (WGS)]

Mortis, you may want to check out Aurora, in that case. Light on the media stuff (well, non-present) but it *is* a domain controller.

[zone23]

spile, on 17 November 2010 - 09:00 AM, said:

Yipes I never realised that. Willl be sticking with v1 in that case.

Why not just create the folders yourself?

[Garry]

zone23, on 05 February 2011 - 07:40 PM, said:

Why not just create the folders yourself?

******************
Easy enough to do and certainly can be controlled by user accounts.

[rmassey]

I use personal folders effectively within v1. This seems like a poor decision by MS for v2. Why didn't they just offer a choice to users during install?

Would you like to create a personal server folder for each user?
- Yes - creates same \Users\<username> folder as v1.
- No - One less SharedFolder is created in v2.

[Tharnax]

rmassey, on 15 February 2011 - 05:07 PM, said:

I use personal folders effectively within v1. This seems like a poor decision by MS for v2. Why didn't they just offer a choice to users during install?

Would you like to create a personal server folder for each user?
- Yes - creates same \Users\<username> folder as v1.
- No - One less SharedFolder is created in v2.

Agreed!!!!!

Finally got my WHS 2011 up and running, waited until I hard Drive Bender was a little more stable, although I have my original WHS still running fine so I wasn't concerned about data loss during DB testing. Anyway, was going through the point of setting up users and noticed that personal folders weren't being created they seem like they are all linking to one massive documents folder. How stupid is that! I keep all users files on the WHS only, allows my to run smaller faster SSD OS drives for the workstations without worrying about it being cluttered with individual users useless junk. Currently in the process of setting up each user and each user folder with access to each folder. (PITA) and so much easier on WHS v1.

Also, one thing I have noticed is the C:\Users on WHS2011 is an available shared folder. Great! A shared user folder on a 60GB OS drive, who the he** at MS thought that would be a good folder to share. Do individuals no longer have any independent thought while building OSs these days? I can't see anyone thinking that was a good idea. I'm assuming we can unshare this folder, although I haven't tried yet. What about the "group" documents folder can this be unshared as well with out any major "hiccups"?

[Klode]

Hi, I experienced that also first time I installed WHS 2011. I really liked the ability to store personal documents, music, photos and videos on WHS v1. To workaround this situation, I created the users share myself and for each user after. But I discovered I was going nowhere with that because everyone can access anyone's shares. So I deleted the shares and create a shared folder for each user on WHS 2011 and setup permissions for each user. Since I did that, no one can access other's user shared folder. This is the workaround I have found and it works fine so far for me.

Claude

[Shidoshi]

Create a "Users" share in the Dashboard. Give that folder read/write access to all users you plan on creating account folders for. Create subfolders for each user account and right-click on each folder, view Properties and go to the Sharing tab. Configure sharing (Don't use Advanced Sharing) based on user access like you would any other share (i.e: only add users you want to give read or write access to and remove the other users). As an example, let's say you have three users: Alice, Bob and John and subfolders for each account within the "Users" share. Each person has write access their own folder, Bob can write to his but read Alice's, and John, the admin, can write to all three -- netiher Alice nor Bob have write access to John's folder.

After you have all your user folders created, everyone will still be able to see each others user account folders, even if they don't have access to it -- Alice, Bob and John can each see each others account subfolders, even though only John has access to all three and neither Alice nor Bob have access to John's folder. Permissions hold true, but Alice and Bob each know that all three of them have their own subfolders.

To remedy that, go to your Server Manager Console, drill down to File Services, then to Share and Storage Management. In the center pane, you'll see all your shares created for the SMB/CIFS protocol (all the default shares and the ones you created in the Dashboard, as well as the required Administrative shares). Right-click on your "Users" share and view properties; click on Advanced, and enable "Access-based enumeration".

That way, only the people who have access to each of the "Users" subfolders will be able to actually see the folder exists; it applies to both browsing Network Shares on client computers and on the Remote Access Website. In other words, Alice only sees her own subfolder, Bob sees only his and Alice's (he can write to his, but can see within Alice's) and John sees and can write to all three (and neither Bob nor Alice even see John's folder exists).

Just like in WHSv1.

You're welcome.

[Ian]

I've just done my first install of 2011 on hardware instead of playing in a VM.

I too want User folders as per my WHS1 server. So I set them up. I then noticed I had 2 user folders, the one I had set up on a 1T drive and one that the system had created on the system drive. The system drive is not going to be big enough for my user folders.
I deleted the user folders I had created leaving the system cretaed one.

My plan was to use Move folder to different location and then add my users to the system created folder but I run into the error;

The following file is in use and cannot be moved: \\?\C:\Users\Media|streamingAdmin\NTUSER.Dat. Ensure all of the files in the folder are closed and try again.

I turned off media streaming and rebooted but it is just the same.

I don't want to break the server as I'm not yet that used to it and need it up and running - so anybody who can offer advice, it will be greatly appreciated.

[RimBlock]

To add on from Shidoshi's post, I made the users folder a hidden share ('users$') and mounted it (z:) on each users profiles on each machine. I then set their library for documents to include z:\[userid]\Documents. I also mapped shares in for communal photos, video and TV areas to the users libraries. Works reasonibly but hit a snag when installing some software and the only docs area in the library was on the server. Got an error about 'xx not a valid drive'. Adding in a local docs area as well as the server docs area for the user resolved this.

Using the shared photo area I can now download my wifes pics from her camera on to my pictures and she can instantly see them from her machine. It also means she doesn't end up spreading them all over the machines as they are all in one place for everyone. Need to make sure the permissions are good though (Me-r/w, Wife-r/w, kids-r/o).

RB

[Shidoshi]

Ian, on 03 August 2011 - 11:39 AM, said:

I've just done my first install of 2011 on hardware instead of playing in a VM.

I too want User folders as per my WHS1 server. So I set them up. I then noticed I had 2 user folders, the one I had set up on a 1T drive and one that the system had created on the system drive. The system drive is not going to be big enough for my user folders.
I deleted the user folders I had created leaving the system cretaed one.

My plan was to use Move folder to different location and then add my users to the system created folder but I run into the error;

The following file is in use and cannot be moved: \\?\C:\Users\Media|streamingAdmin\NTUSER.Dat. Ensure all of the files in the folder are closed and try again.

I turned off media streaming and rebooted but it is just the same.

I don't want to break the server as I'm not yet that used to it and need it up and running - so anybody who can offer advice, it will be greatly appreciated.

The Users folders that people would use from their client machines (or the ones that are created in WHSv1) are Shares to be made only on the D drive; the User folder you were trying to move was the Server's local user account setup, made for users who actually log into the server itself -- since the only user allowed to login to the server (in a "console" session) is "Administrator", that's about the only user account folder you'll see (that one and the MediaStreamingAdmin folder for DLNA streaming). You don't want to change the "C:\Users" folder, you should have been working with the one created by the Share.

[Ian]

Shidosi - that's not the case.
My user folder as well as Public is in C:

[Shidoshi]

Ian, on 03 December 2011 - 06:27 PM, said:

Shidosi - that's not the case.
My user folder as well as Public is in C:

Yes, but what I'm saying is that the User folder that users should be accessing should be with the rest of the Shares, not on the OS drive. The only user folders that are created in a default install of both WHSv1 and WHS 2011 will be the Admin folders and Public (a result of a normal Windows file system), because the Administrator is the only user allowed to log into the server directly in both WHSv1 and WHS 2011.

In your install, you created your server user folder in C:\Users, which is not a shared folder by default, and not one meant to be moved to another location. Just like in WHSv1, the User folder which is meant for users accessing via shares by default should not be located on the OS drive. Otherwise, you get issues like the ones you're dealing with when trying to move the folder to larger volume.

[jpdraven]

In WHS 2011 you can resize the partition of the C drive to make full use of the hard drive in Disk Management. You simply delete the partition your dont want on the drive... in this case it should be the larger partiton of the 2 on your main C drive.

Now after delting that large partition you simply EXTEND your C partition to the full size of the drive.

This was the first thing I experimented with on WHS 2011. In WHS V1 you could do the same thing BUT, you had to do a cooky bypass / trick the OS thing during WHS V1 installation.... which is stupid BUT did work.

WHS 2011 drive resizing is a breeze.

[jpdraven]

It is ridiculous that MS takes the user share folders out as a default aspect of WHS.

However is it the end of the world? No not really. Just create the user folders and set the proper permissions to use them.

I have a few users that remote into my server for all sorts of things and the one place they NEVER seem to store anything is in their personal folder lol. I however use my personal folder regularly to move things from my main laptop off to a safe storage area.... my personal folder.

Oh well. C'mon now we all know how Microsoft is, they do what THEY want, not what WE want. Oh well.