Question Change user profile preference saved location

We are experiencing issues with Unity when a user selects the colour picker or closes the project where an error pops up (see attached screen captures), these settings are saved in the user profile (C:\Users), but we have folder redirection enabled where it uses UNC paths which Unity does not like. Is there a way where we can change the path of the Unity User preferences (C:\Users\(Username)\Appdata\Roaming\Unity\...) to a mapped drive?

 

Is that company policy or does it serve a different purpose?

Seems odd to have local user data folders redirected to network folders. The way I know this setup for sharing user accounts between machines (eg employees can pick any available machine and continue their work) each user's data is synchronized only during login/logout of the user account.

I don't think you can configure Unity in that way, but perhaps tools exist that allow you to fool an app into writing to a specific location but redirecting that path transparently - although typically that would be done with symlinks, or hardlinks.

 

I don't think your Windows Users folder is by design meant to be used like that but it's for local users. You can redirect any drives in Windows, but that all comes with caches, availability issues, registry stuff, groups, active ids and all sorts of admin headache.

Sure, if you know exactly how that stuff works under the hood, go nuts and configure it to work. I'm just saying you are inviting admin headache where these network connections are somehow latently managed by Windows.

From a developer (and not a Windows admin) perspective, it's very important that development work is independent of any network. So you always use a local drive, then use version control to synchronize your work with others, and you do this in a controlled manner using manual pull/push commands, not with any automation. Unity doesn't follow this rule because the Editor is always online, but at least it's Unity's problem to keep it working.

So I'm not just saying not to do this with Unity but don't do it in any software development. Development has needs that are higher from "normal laptop users", developers need low level access and full control of hardware. That's why most companies that do development have separate developer laptops that are outside the company normal IT policies. And even better than having Windows "Local admin rights" etc access control root privileges, it is best if the developer laptops can be even platform independent to support Linux.