Roaming profile learning experience

All,

Wednesday, for what reason we don't know, my windows roaming profile would
not load, meaning I could not sign on with my normal profile. Windows
helpfully made a temporary profile for me. Domains and roaming profiles are
relatively new here, so I got The Network Consultant over to help fix
things.

We got everything was back to normal except Outlook. The Outlook .pst file
was gone - Outlook would not open. Since we're on Google Apps, my email and
calendar would be fine as I could simply resynch. But this means my entire
task list was gone. After considerable research on The Network Consultant's
part, he found that the "Local Settings" subfolder of user profiles is not
synchronized back to the domain server, and that this is by design. It just
so happens that Outlook will oftentimes put it's file in that folder. Guess
where mine was. It also just so happened that I still had a backup (July
17) from before we went to the new server setup. So now I have a tasks list
that is over 2 months out of date. To say this is an unpleasant experience
is an understatement. We spent the rest of the day trying to recoup to no
avail. We even installed an undelete utility to try and bring it back. No
luck.

Needless to say, I was a bit peeved at The Network Consultant as I would
have expected he knew about the Local Settings not being pushed to the
domain server. We had discussed backups to a great extent and he knew how
anal retentive I am in that area. When he discussed it with several of his
colleagues, they weren't aware of it either. It hadn't caused issues before
because the vast majority of their installs were Exchange. (According to
him, in an Exchange environment, there are no .pst files. The data is in
the Exchange database.) Google Apps is relatively new.

You windows gurus most likely already knew this. But for the rest of us, if
you're expecting that domain server backups will back up all of your users
settings, be advised the Local Settings subfolder is not pushed to the
domain server.