Question Weird school setup too complicated for unity?

I started at a school as external part time teacher and installed Unity and upon the first start it throws this Exception:

DirectoryNotFoundException: Could not find a part of the path "\\SERVER\USER$\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Editor-5.x\Preferences\shortcuts\default\UserProfile.shortcut".

It is spamming that message thousands of times and also the Editor glitches out completely

The Administrator says, they linked the user repositories to a folder on the server and did some group policies so that the profile of a student or a teacher will be available on any PC.

I'm really sure there are better ways to set it up, but for now I'm here with that issue and I'm sure I can't be the only one. Did anyone encounter this or does Unity Support itself has an idea to fix it?

 

Pretty sure Unity doesn't support these UNC paths.

I think you need to map a drive letter to it, but I don't know if that is sufficient.

 

Ugh. I just hate such stupid network setups.

One does not simply redirect AppData to a server location, period. Even though Windows technically supports redirecting these folders you will run into issues, even if the relocated folder is mapped to a local drive. For instance: relocate user folders to D: from within Settings, then shut down, detach the D: drive and boot up Windows with all the data missing ... no good! If the server is ever down: likewise. All machines non-functional, even though everyone could happily continue working locally.

Not to mention what happens to logged-in users and open applications and their data when the server goes down. I bet data loss during an unscheduled network downtime is rather common.

The preferred (if not the correct) way to do that is to synchronize user folders on login/logout. If the network location is not available, you'd still have the option to work with stale data from the previous login and you'd only need to be careful when switching machines. But nevertheless, this is what all companies I've worked for or with have been doing.

Anyhow, this should be directed at the admins really. Still, it bothers me that people are still setting it up this way.

 

I'm not even sure, why unity is trying to access them as UNC pathes, it could access the data as it is used to at C:\Users\<USERNAME>\**\* as they are linked to there, but it somehow still tries to resolve it as the UNC

 

They have their ups and downs, but yeah I think I would set it up with a sync instead as well.

The Admins are actually an external service company and they told us to find a solution or pay a couple hundred Euro for them to find the Solution. (I know this should be illegal. Especially for schools)

 

Put the Unity editor on your C:// drive. Don't put it on that shared drive. Everyone who needs to use Unity needs to download for each computer that needs access to it.

If you put Unity there so that multiple people can access the same codebase, use source control instead.

 

The editor is in default install path on C://

The issue is, that Unity tries to save usersettings like the default color palette, scene layout or workspace layout in the user home and it fails doing that.