How to operate two or more independent accounts


  1. Posts : 3
    Windows 10
       #1

    How to operate two or more independent accounts


    Hello all,
    I'm Steve and this is my first post to 10-Forums.

    To explain from the outset, this is a scratch build - re-built yesterday (Saturday 2021-12-19) so I could upgrade my drives and setup a new clean build.

    I'm running 10-Pro and am using this pc for both my personal and professional work which inevitably means two separate accounts; problem is, I need to operate this as two exclusive accounts without dual-booting the pc.

    I've created my two admin accounts: Personal & Work, have partitioned by 2TB secondary drive to give 1.7TB to D: for personal and, 100GB to E: for my Professional account so all its bits can reside there.

    And my config is:
    * C:\ Standard Windows deployment - all program installs etc go to C:
    * D:\ All Personal files and libraries including Desktop, Documents, Downloads etc
    * E:\ All Work files and libraries including Desktop, Documents, Downloads etc

    Now I need to find a method of complete account independence, for example, muting the system in the personal account, but keeping work unmuted.
    I need to install Wireguard for my work, so would like this active in the work account, but not present in the personal account.
    I'm a database engineer and BI analyst/developer both in my personal and professional life, so (and this is where it gets really complicated) I need to be able to operate Tableau from two separate accounts - personal to use my own key, and work to use the key supplied by my employer; but I also run SQL Server 2016 Dev from this same machine, and want the work profile to be able to access the server too.

    SQL Server might not be too difficult as I could create a Server account from the work profile to login with.

    And I don't want distractions to be available in the work profile eg, Steam and Ubisoft

    But then there are other things such as SQL Server Integration Services, Python, R, Jupyter Notebook, that I want both accounts to be able to access, but things like Google Drive to have two separate accounts - this is actually a key one, as I dislike OneDrive trying to take over and backup EVERYTHING, so choose to use Google Drive for hot back-up and OneDrive for cold-backup (OneDrive has the larger storage), but annoyingly, my employer also uses Google Drive, so would need to save hot files to this drive too.

    Any ideas how I can achieve this with ADFS etc? I suppose it might be more helpful that I'm on Win 10 Pro.

    Steve
    Windows Version: 10.0.19044.1415
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 16,974
    Windows 10 Home x64 Version 22H2 Build 19045.4170
       #2

    Steve,

    Your accounts are independent. You do not need to do anything to make them so.

    You can set different system volumes for different user accounts.

    Unless Wireguard's installation procedure includes an option to install it just for a single user then it will be available for all user accounts.
    - Windows apps are examples of applications that are installed for only a single user.
    - Some others have this capability but not very many.

    I do not know of any method of doing what you want with Tableau.

    Since Google drive & OneDrive relate to user accounts I think you can set them up the way you want. I don't use either of them so do not know how you would use them.

    Denis
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 3
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #3

    Thank-you for your response Denis, however, I disagree in this instance that all my Windows 10 accounts are 100% independent. I'm thinking there must be more to configure here to achieve this, which is the purpose of my post:

    I do understand that for the most part, all Windows accounts are independent of one another and thus are exclusive, though I have also noticed that setting the volume for one account is global, affecting the other account too, which leads me to suppose that the accounts aren't absolutely independent.
    This is also true of ODBC connectivity, configuring a Redshift connector in my work account using my IAM authent, I do not want this connector available in my personal account.
    Also, only my personal account needs access to my NAS for all of my media, yet the work account was also able to connect, indicating that network protocols are shared across all accounts.

    Take this from the example of a Win 10 Pro business laptop, which is kinda the direction I'm looking at, every user account do have completely different settings, even as far as volume. So this is the config I'm looking to mirror.

    Tableau has a very special use case in that each installed major version is independent, and with 4 releases per year, I can for example use the newly released 2021.4 version with my work account, and 2021.3 with my personal account.

    But SQL Server on the other hand is different: on my previous Win 10 Home build, I was not able to create a Server username for the work account to login, having to use the home account instead.

    Any ideas on how I can achieve this complete exclusive separation?
    Steve

    - - - Updated - - -

    I'm thinking that for complete 100% account separation, it might be easier to deploy my work account to a VM - I do need to deploy Ubuntu too so having Windows on the VM probably wouldn't hurt, though I had hoped to avoid using a VM for Windows due to the reduction in hardware resource.

    Steve
      My Computer


 

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