[sewerurchin]

I tried searching for this with no luck. Sorry if it is a dumb question - I'm
still learning.

Let's say you have a domain and you create an account for John on the
DC. John then can turn on his PC and log into the domain, where he can
access various domain resources. John has made various customizations to his
environment, like putting various icons and folders on his desktop and
setting his taskbar to autohide. Now let's say you remove the computer
from the domain and into a workgroup. What happens to all of John's
'stuff'? I know that he won't be able to log in until a local account is
created. Does creating a local account that has the same name as the
domain account had get him access to all of local files and configurations?
How is this sort of thing usually handled?

[Advertisements]

Domain accounts on workstations are typically different for every company. Some companies will have folder redirection set up where specific folders (Desktop/My Documents) are located elsewhere on the network or they might even have roaming profiles set up. It really depends on how the network is set up.

It's best to create a separate local account and copy the files over from where ever they are located. If they're local they'll be under a folder with the domain name in the folder's name where all other profiles are stored. If the account is a local administrator account it can even browse through that folder.

[NeonFx]

Domain accounts on workstations are typically different for every company. Some companies will have folder redirection set up where specific folders (Desktop/My Documents) are located elsewhere on the network or they might even have roaming profiles set up. It really depends on how the network is set up.

It's best to create a separate local account and copy the files over from where ever they are located. If they're local they'll be under a folder with the domain name in the folder's name where all other profiles are stored. If the account is a local administrator account it can even browse through that folder.

[SongCloud]

Just as a follow up, there is a free tool out there that I have used in the past from ForensIT called ProfWiz. It can be found at there website here. This tools allows you to easily transfer a user account from one domain to another or from either a domain account to a local account or vice-versa. in the scenario that you mentioned, the free, personal, version would work fine. If you were in charge if the IT department for a large company or you were doing multiple migrations and needed more configuration options, then you may want to pay for the professional version or the corporate version. (Personal is licensed per technician, corporate is per machine in bundles of 50). This tool made my life easier when we had to do an emergency domain migration after a server crash and had a few machines that were offsite when we did the domain transfer. This tool made it easy to migrate the user profiles from the old domain to the new one.

Hope this helps!

[Troy]

ProfWiz has saved my life a few times, very handy tool... +1

[williambjacobs]

+2

[RobertCristofer]

ProfWiz is really useful tool!