Windows 7: Any suggestions on IP based Primary drive

RLY, id like to know if there is a word for this. i see people who are total security buffs, and have backups CONSTANTLY... but ive seen an interesting method, where people use a small 35gb HDD or, now, more commonly an SSD for the OS, and then use an external server for their applications. things are installed and used as if they are right on the computer, but the actual location is somewhere else entirely. obviously this is generally going to be a rather slow process unless you are on a fiber optic network... but on your OWN network, not having to query an IP adress over the internet, cutting out relay time, could i pull this off by sharing a primary drive on the server with the network, and using the windows reg make it my primary install location?

im curious to hear CONSTRUCTIVE thoughts... i know there are likely better methods, and im sure theres a thousand things people could point out are wrong with this method, but it intrigues me, so maybe some of you who know more about it, can humor me, and edumicate me a little more on it.

This is over my head since it's not something I have ever thought about doing before. I do know that Windows Server 2008 has a Roll for something like this I'm not sure how it works though. I would be interested to hear from someone who has actually set something like this up in the past.

i got the idea from somthing i saw during an educational visit on base. they had the computers set up on their servers, so thay could go to any computer and log in, the user name and password was setup to a partition of a server, making it so they could acces their own personal files from any pc in real time. It fascinated me. again, like i said, id like to know if someone knows more about this, and would take some time to educate me, and others on this forum thread further, perhaps.

The profiles that you're talking about are called roaming profiles. That can be setup on any computer inside of local users and groups MMC snap-in or computer management. all this requires if for you to setup a location for the account on a share that the user has access too then change the profile type to roaming.

How it works is each time the user logs on it checks the files on the server and any file that has changed is downloaded to the computer. The files are always still stored locally too.

i gotchya, so the server is just looking at what changed, and backing it up... ir is it downloading in both places simultaniously? im curious because as far as i know, the concept is that if anything happens to the pc, the server can just be booted on the new pc and all will be well. if the pc gives out durring the upload process to the server, than it does no good. so like i asked just a moment ago i guess, is it downloading to server simultaneously? or is it happening in 2 stages?

I believe it just happens when the user log it will copy everything that changed back to the server. Most of the time this would only take a few seconds. Then if the user logs on to a different work station anything that is different on that workstation from what the server has will be copied to the computer.

I'm not exactly sure where it is stored on the PC though, or what would happen if the user logged on an off of the computer when it was off the network then back on when the user was back on the network. There are a lot of questions that i don't have the answers for since i have never actually set one up i just know about the concept.