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AndreasT
Asked: 2012-09-12 05:42:59 +0800 CST

Took a computer out of a domain that does not exist anymore - User's documents gone

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We have long ago switched off our Windows Domain. A user came in with his laptop, that was still a member of it. I think the Desktop and files were synced with the fileserver, but that doesn't exist anymore either. So Windows saved the files locally. I copied the user's local directory (C:\users\) and copied it to a safe location(s), which succeeded without errors (so I didn't completely check if everything was there). I assumed that would get me all the user's files.

Then I took the computer out of the domain.

Now I noticed "My Documents" seems to be Empty, which would be very bad. The Desktop came over, the Documents didn't. I did the copy multiple times without errors.

I guess windows simply removed them when the computer was taken out of the domain, and didn't copy them because (maybe) I copied them as the local Administrator.

Is there some place on the disk I could perhaps find these files?

active-directory

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    if the domain had been using folder redirection to move "my documents" to a network share and synced to the laptop using offline files, then they are probably in the Client Side Cache. this post on superuser.com gives instructions on how to use microsoft's csccmd.exe tool to recover those files.

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