Does GPO "Delete User Profiles Older Than X Days" Remove Local Administrator Profile?

Question

Hello,

I am using the Group Policy setting "Automatically delete user profiles older than a specified number of days on system restart" to clean up old user profiles on our Windows systems.

I would like to confirm:

1. Does this policy delete the Local Administrator profile (C:\Users\Administrator) if it hasn’t been used within the specified days?
2. Are there any default exclusions for system profiles such as Default Profile or Public?
3. What are the possible impacts of enabling this policy?
   • Does it affect service accounts running under a local user profile?
   • Could it impact cached domain credentials for offline logins?
   • Any profile that is being used as a service account will that we deleted?

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

Hi!

Yes, there are eclusions to the profiles deleted using this GPO. These are:

1. Built in Administrator (C:\users\Administrator)
2. Default profile (C:\users\Default)
3. Local service and Network service profiles (C:\users\LocalService, C:\users\NetworkService)
4. All other accounts in use by the system (AKA services, workers etc)

Although if you run the task as a PowerShell script, no exclusions are going to be made, and it can break system if you do not know what you do!

Have a nice day :)