Roaming Profiles

You may run a roaming profile environment with Eclipse and from time to time it may start up with an error message like Invalid Configuration Location telling you The configuration area at C:\Users\[username]\.eclipse\...\configuration could not be created. Please choose a writable location using the '-configuration' command line option.

The configuration area at C:\Users\[username]\.eclipse\...\configuration could not be created. Please choose a writable location using the '-configuration' command line option.

In best practice Enterprise environments, users have a home directory and the folders like AppData\Roaming and Documents will be redirected with Windows Policy named Folder Redirection to their home drive located on network. In AppData\Roaming folder very many applications are saving their user specific data and this allows a user to log on to any PC in your company with keeping all settings intact. The AppData\Roaming folder become larger over time and 300MB are very common in todays world. For performance reasons you should not copy this on every login/logout to the computer and back to the server. There is many banana software on the market from developers that are not aware of this technology. Notify them, this are bugs - no discussion.

It's best practice to enable the policy Delete Cached copies of roaming profiles that truncates a local user profile from disk to free up disk space after a user logs off a computer. With Windows 7 this stuff can be cached locally for some time, but the performance reasons are still the same.