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I’m often surprised when I have admins call in, and they don’t know what type of user profiles they are running. I then ask if they are running mandatory, local, or roaming hoping to narrow down the options for them. Quite often I get, “What is the difference between them?” I’ve decided to lay out the very basics of each type of profile, and what is good and bad about each. 

Local Profile: This is the basic type of profile that requires no setup on the admin part other than creating the domain account. Each time the user logs into a server, their profile is cached locally on that server. This means that if they log into server A and change some settings, log out, log into server B, those settings will not be loaded since they were saved on server A.

Pros: Local profiles are the easiest to set up. Should a profile ever become corrupted, the user will only be prevented from logging in to the one server, not the entire farm.

Cons: User settings are saved to the local machine, so those settings will be unavailable when they log into another server.

Mandatory Profile: A mandatory profile is a profile shared on a network location. The user’s profile path is then pointed to this shared profile, so every user that logs in will get those settings. The users do not have permission to copy out any changes they make. This is a very strict profile that does not allow the users to save any of their personalized settings.

Pros: Fast login times with the lowest chance of profile corruption. All users have a standard profile that the admin has designed.

Cons: Users cannot customize their profiles or application settings at all.

Roaming Profile: This is the opposite of a mandatory profile. Each user has their own profile that is stored on a network share. Every time the user logs in, the profile is copied from the network share and is cached on the local machine. When the user logs off, their settings are saved back up to the network share.

Pros: Users have individual profiles they can customize. User’s customized profile is available to them for every server in the farm.

Cons: Long login times, and frequent profile corruption.