If you are running Remote Desktop Services on Windows Server 2012 and want to have a better way to manage the user profiles than the roaming profiles or folder redirections, you may want to check out User Profile Disks. It stores user and application data on a single virtual disk that is dedicated to one user’s profile. The server attaches the User Profile Disk at login and detaches it at logoff. And because it’s stored on a separate virtual disk, the user data in the User Profile Disk won’t get discarded if the server needs to roll back for some reason.
I’ve been using it to manage my remote desk users for quite a while and am really happy with the way it works. But there is this little thing that bothers me whenever I look at the folder that hosts all the user profile disks.
Right, the file name of each user profile disk is based on the SID of the user. It’s a daunting job to translate the ID to a real domain user, especially when you have a long list of users that use remote desktop service.
And here comes this little tool called Sidder for rescue.
Sidder is a free portable tool made by Arjan Mensch to help people like me to quickly find out which user profile disk belongs to which domain user. It requires no installation, no DLL. Just download the tool, copy it to where you need it and run it. You can run it on server platform like Windows Server 2008 and 2012 as well as the desktop platform like Windows 10.
From the list from the tool, you can find out not only the owner of the user profile disk but also the timestamp and the size of the user profile disk, as well as the status of whether it’s been in use or not.
You can refresh the status by clicking on the Refresh button at the top right corner. You can also browse to a different location for a different set of user profile disks. You can even select a particular UPD and delete it to get that user a fresh start.