What's the best way to do user profile/folder redirect/home directory archiving?
- by tpederson
My company is in dire need of a redesign around how we handle user account administration. I've been tasked with automating the process. The end goal is to have the whole works triggered by the business, and IT only looking in when there's an error reported. The interim phase is going to be semi-manual. That is a level 2 tech inputs the user's info and supervises the process. The current hurdle I'm facing is user profile archiving.
Our security team requires us to archive the profile directories for any terminated user for 60 days in case the legal team requires access to their files. Our AD is as much a mess as everything else, so there are some users with home directories and some with profiles. Anyone who has a profile dir in AD also has a good deal of their profile redirected to our file servers over DFS. In order to complete the process manually you find the user in AD, disable them, find their home/profile dir, go there and take ownership, create an archive folder, move all their files over, then delete the old dir. Some users have many many gigs of nonsense and this can take quite some time. Even automated the process would not be a quick one.
I'm thinking that I need to have a client side C# GUI for the quick stuff and some server side batch script or console app to offload this long running process. I have a batch script that works decently using takeown and robocopy, but I wonder if a C# console app would do a better job.
So, my question at long last is, what do you think is the best way to handle this? I can't imagine this is a unique problem, how do other admins get this done? The last place I worked was easily 10x larger than the place I'm in now. If we would have been doing this manual crap there, they'd have needed a team of at least 30 full time workers to keep up.
I have decent skills in C#.net and batch scripting, but am a quick study and I have used most every language once or twice.
Thank you for reading this and I look forward to seeing what imaginative solutions you all can come up with.
