Group Policy: Automatically Delete User Profiles Older Than Certain Number of Days Win 10 not working.

P. Amila Mahesh Muthukumarana 26

I enabled Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\User Profiles\Delete User Profiles Older Than xxx GPO and apply to Windows 10 PCs.
Dayes set to 90.
Unfortunately, this didn't remove old data folders in C:\user.
I checked the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System was added the REG_DWORD
I'm using Win 2019 domain and Win 10 client PC's.
Can someone help me to fix this?
The link which I use is https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/28647.group-policy-how-to-automatically-delete-user-profiles-older-than-certain-number-of-days.aspx

Kr,
Amila.

DonnaSmith 156 Reputation points

2022-11-02T11:37:40.033+00:00

was there a fix for this - ntuser.dat is getting updated preventing the GPO from working
Is there a way around this to achieve profile removal?
DonnaSmith 156 Reputation points

2023-01-04T16:03:57.943+00:00

Any update on this. I can use the script to update ntuser.dat timestamp with the date from usrclass.dat - this works but the GPO is still not removing any old profiles?
John Curtiss 81 Reputation points

2023-04-01T22:50:40.42+00:00

if you're going to write and schedule a script to change the dates on ntuser.dat anyway, why still depend on the GPO to delete the old profiles? just add another line in the script to delete them.

this one deletes AD profiles when they are older than three months. change the sid prefix to match your AD's sid prefix

(Get-WmiObject win32_userprofile | ? {$.sid -like "S-1-5-21-something-something-*" -and $($.converttodatetime($_.lastusetime)) -le (get-date).AddMonths(-3)}).delete()
Moulay A Rahhali 0 Reputation points

2024-02-22T17:02:34.6966667+00:00

this doesn't work and i don't have cleanup profile on the Registry

Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

Hello @P. Amila Mahesh Muthukumarana ,

Thanks for posting here.

I did the testing in my lab, and below are the findings.

The group policy was configured as shown below.

This policy setting allows an administrator to automatically delete user profiles on system restart that have not been used within a specified number of days. Note: One day is interpreted as 24 hours after a specific user profile was accessed.

If you enable this policy setting, the User Profile Service will automatically delete on the next system restart all user profiles on the computer that have not been used within the specified number of days.

So I restarted the system and then checked the folders under C:\Users and User profiles were deleted.

Hope it helps. For any question, please post here.

Best regards,
Hannah Xiong

Anonymous

2021-06-21T01:49:55.02+00:00

Hello @P. Amila Mahesh Muthukumarana ,

II have replied to you with the testing carried out by me last week. In my testing, it may need to wait for several minutes and then check the overtime user profiles will be deleted or not. Hope the information will be of some help to you.

For any update or question, welcome to post here. Thanks a lot.

Best regards,
Hannah Xiong
P. Amila Mahesh Muthukumarana 26 Reputation points

2021-06-21T05:40:16.63+00:00

Hi @Anonymous ,

Thank you for your valuable reply. I checked my environment, User profile data folder (C:\Users\abc) is older than 30 days (last modified date 18/02/2018) but NTUSER.DAT was recently updated.
That is why GPO didn't remove old user profile from the PC. When i check the user profile sign-in tab, user profile modified the same as NTUSER.DAT date.
The same day windows update was installed.

Kr,
Amila.
Susan Pieroni 0 Reputation points

2023-02-24T17:59:37.8366667+00:00

What would be the steps to only remove the Azure profiles but keep the local accounts?
Anant Bera 271 Reputation points

2025-02-12T07:04:02.9666667+00:00

Hi @Anonymous

Is the local administrator account also deleted? I have tested this in my test lab, and as i see in your environment, the local admin profile is also deleted. Is this the expected behavior?
Anant Bera 271 Reputation points

2025-02-12T07:19:52.8766667+00:00

Hi @Anonymous

Is the local administrator account also deleted? I have tested this in my test lab, and in your environment, the local admin profile is also deleted. Is this the expected behavior?

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Rytram 0 Reputation points

2023-11-08T05:58:37.8966667+00:00

Hello.

This was an issue that plagues me at my previous job. The company I worked for used micro PC's such as Lenovo's and Dell Optiplex computers. The main issue was the meager 128GB drives becoming full and bogging the computer down. This is inevitably an issue that will come up at any business that uses roaming profiles (which is most).

This is not a water tight solution, but a pretty decent attempt at addressing the issue.

My Method uses the last modified date of a users folder as a baseline for their inactivity. From there, I with some assistance, created a script that reads all users, their folder size, and last modified dates all in one nifty little popup window with check boxes and a delete option.

Here is the script we came up with. I would be glad for feedback and modification suggestions. Such as replacing last modified date of user folder with the UsrClass.Dat date.

user cleanup PS script.txt
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Mikkel Lund Knudsen 116 Reputation points

2024-04-09T17:37:05.3933333+00:00

Hey, just came across this thread in 2024 - does the Intune Settings Catalog for this work, or is it similar issue here? Thanks!
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Rytram 0 Reputation points

2023-11-08T05:46:26.55+00:00

Hello.

This was an issue that plagues me at my previous job. The company I worked for used micro PC's such as Lenovo's and Dell Optiplex computers. The main issue was the meager 128GB drives becoming full and bogging the computer down. This is inevitably an issue that will come up at any business that uses roaming profiles (which is most).

This is not a water tight solution, but a pretty decent attempt at addressing the issue.

My Method uses the last modified date of a users folder as a baseline for their inactivity. From there, I with some assistance, created a script that reads all users, their folder size, and last modified dates all in one nifty little popup window with check boxes and a delete option.

Here is the script we came up with. I would be glad for feedback and modification suggestions. Such as replacing last modified date of user folder with the UsrClass.Dat date.

user cleanup PS script.txt
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Group Policy: Automatically Delete User Profiles Older Than Certain Number of Days Win 10 not working.

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