Reducing the Size of the Roaming Profile

I have a roaming profile for Windows that can be accessed from any computer on the intranet. When the profile is too large, it takes a long time to log in and out, since so much data has to be downloaded and uploaded.

Two apps that affect the size of the profile are NetBeans and Thunderbird. By default, the user files are placed in the profile. A third app is DropBox. That is a real killer.

NetBeans

First, close NetBeans.

To move the user files for NetBeans, navigate to the install dir for NetBeans and modify
/etc/netbeans.conf

Look for
netbeans_default_userdir=.....

Change it to the new location. Use ${varname} to include environment variables.

If an environment variable is used, this will change the location of the file for all new configurations.

Thunderbird

First, close Thunderbird.

To move the user file for Thunderbird, modify the profiles.ini in the AppData folder.
In Windows, type %appdata% from the run... option in the Start menu to open the AppData folder.

Change to the Thunderbird folder. The profiles.ini file is here. Edit it and change two things:
IsRelative=0
Path=C:\........

Move the default profile folder that is in the Profiles folder to the new location.

This only moves a profile that already exists. I do not know how to change the initial location of the profile.

Dropbox

From the Dropbox preferences, select a new location for the Dropbox files. Caution: The Dropbox folder cannot be placed on a network share. Dropbox can not tell the difference between "The share folder is not available" and "The user just deleted all the files in the share".




Check out my other blog post on moving Dropbox out of the roaming profile.