How to Move the Location of a Locally Cached Profile (214470)

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256986 Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry

SUMMARY

By default, the locally cached copy of a profile is stored in %SystemRoot%\Profiles\, which may be an issue if you have a large number of people logging on to a computer. If you have a large number of people logging on to a computer (which creates a large number of profiles), disk space on the operating system partition may become scarce. You can move the locally cached copy of a profile to another local partition.

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To move the locally cached copy of the profile, you will need to know the security identifier (SID) of the user whose profile you want to move. You can identify the SID by using GetSID.exe from the Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit.

Windows NT 4.0 stores the local profile information in the registry under the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Under the ProfileList key, there will be subkeys named with the SIDs of the users who have logged on to this computer. (To find the profile information for the user whose locally cached profile you want to move, find the SID for the user with the GetSID.exe utility.) Inside of the appropriate user's subkey, you will see a string value named ProfileImagePath. ProfileImagePath should be set to a local path where you want to store the profile.

If you do not have a roaming profile and you want to maintain your profile after you change the locally cached profile path, copy the contents of your old locally cached profile folder to the new location set in the ProfileImagePath value.