User folders

[DarkSerge]

Greetings.I am curious, is there a way to link the user's account folders to another drive? I like to keep all my music and movies and such on a separate partition than where my system is installed. I'd really like to keep music and such in the music folders in my user account (folder such as "My Documents" or "My Music" located in the user account) but then I'd have to keep it all on the system drive instead of the partition I set aside for such things.So is there any way to make the Music folder in my user account reside on another drive or even have my user folders located on another drive? Right now, in my user account, the folders such as my music just contain shortcuts to the folder on the other partition.This is on a Windows 7 Home Premium system.

[Tushman]

Greetings.I am curious, is there a way to link the user's account folders to another drive? I like to keep all my music and movies and such on a separate partition than where my system is installed. I'd really like to keep music and such in the music folders in my user account (folder such as "My Documents" or "My Music" located in the user account) but then I'd have to keep it all on the system drive instead of the partition I set aside for such things.So is there any way to make the Music folder in my user account reside on another drive or even have my user folders located on another drive? Right now, in my user account, the folders such as my music just contain shortcuts to the folder on the other partition.This is on a Windows 7 Home Premium system.

With Win XP, a simple registry edit would be the answer. As with all new OS, Win 7 has some different approaches you can take. A Google search will turn up many answers.Check out this thread.

Hi, this thread is great. Unfortunately I have already installed Win7 and prefer to avoid doing so again, so unattend.xml would be my least preferred choice. However, I am still confused as to what constitutes best practice. In my search for the answer I found 3 possible approaches....1 - Use the Location tab to change the location of the User sub folders. Pros - easy; cons - doesnt work for all user folders, especially those that contain your .pst fileshttp://www.w7forums.com/change-location-my...older-t338.htmlhttp://hubpages.com/hub/Windows-7_-_Moving_My_Documentshttp://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/18629...t-location.htmlhttp://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=13712 - Use regedit to change the location of the user sub folders and the root users folder. Pros - referenced by most as the way to go; cons - sounds very fiddly (Joshua Mouch did lots of copying and pasting); unclear impact on indexing and windows upgradeshttp://joshmouch.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/...ation-in-vista/http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/20...n-in-windows-7/3 - Use symbolic linking to change the location of various user folders - pros - looks easy, cons - unknown reliabilityhttp://www.windows7home.net/how-to-move-us...windows-7vista/http://www.starkeith.net/coredump/2009/05/...-another-drive/http://tuts4tech.net/2009/08/05/windows-7-...rent-partition/Has anyone compared updating registries vs the symbolic link approach? On further reflection what is the downside of the operating system image including the Appdata folder? If there is no downside then approach 1 probably works fine. Can I undo any of the above approaches and try a different one? or is it a case of new install each time?Thanks, Marco

Keep in mind that there are many applications that use the Users profile folder to store items other than your music & documents. For example, Outlook users should expect to see the *.pst file located in their user profile folder and therefore if you hack the registry to point to another partition or drive, then it will probably be stored to whatever drive you select. Atleast that is way it works in Win XP. I haven't tried it on Win 7, so you'll have to experiment.Also note that Win 7 has the "documents and settings" folder, the purpose of which I explained in this thread. So there are several keys in the registry you'll have to edit accordingly.As with all registry hacks, take precaution and backup the registry first.Please do report back and let us know which solution worked the best. Like I said, I've done it with WinXP; but never on a Win 7 system. Edited June 26, 2010 by Tushman

[DarkSerge]

Thank you for the information. :)I feel kind of silly for not checking this earlier, but I found the location tab, now that I'm actually on my Windows 7 system. (I was posting from my Linux system earlier.) I see that method listed above. So far it's worked the way I want it, but we'll see over time how well it sticks. I don't use Outlook, so the .pst files I don't believe would be a worry for me. I don't mind leaving the user folder on the system drive, I mostly just wanted to have most of it stored somewhere else.

Edited June 26, 2010 by DarkSerge

[rbdietz]

I am curious, is there a way to link the user's account folders to another drive? I like to keep all my music and movies and such on a separate partition than where my system is installed. I'd really like to keep music and such in the music folders in my user account (folder such as "My Documents" or "My Music" located in the user account) but then I'd have to keep it all on the system drive instead of the partition I set aside for such things.So is there any way to make the Music folder in my user account reside on another drive or even have my user folders located on another drive? Right now, in my user account, the folders such as my music just contain shortcuts to the folder on the other partition.This is on a Windows 7 Home Premium system.

Most if not all of the old style Windows XP Shell Folders (My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, ...) have basically been replaced by Libraries (Documents, Music, Pictures, Video, ...) in Windows 7.This isn't just a matter of changing names. Libraries are VIRTUAL FOLDERS that provide a single, unified, simultaneous view of multiple folder locations (as if they were a single folder). The folders Included in a Library can potentially be scattered across multiple partitions and even multiple pieces of hardware. You can add and remove folders from these Libraries at will. One of the Included folders of a Library is designated as the Default save location for that library. You can also create your own Libraries to be used for your own purposes (example).I found this short article by Paul Thurrott to be useful in coming to grips with Windows 7 Libraries.

[Peachy]

I use symbolic links to folders I've added to the library. So, for instance in the My Music folder in my Library, I've added a directory (giving it a useful, memorable name) that tells me it's on a shared network folder but is really a symbolic link to the folder. However, for my notebook, I've used a slightly different process for setting this up otherwise you will run into caching issues when you are disconnected from your home network. I create a blank folder and then add it to the appropriate Library folder. I then delete the folder from the original location using Windows Explorer. However, this leaves the virtual reference in the Library. Next I open a command prompt and navigate to the Library. You will see the deleted folder still listed. Then I create a symbolic link to the network share using its UNC path and voila when I open up the new folder in the Library the network folder's content shows up!

[goretsky]

Hello,I've taken the approach of updating the data in the Location tab to point to the path containing that particular piece of data. I do not use Microsoft Outlook for email nor do I make use of libraries so this approach works for me.Regards,Aryeh Goretsky

[Frank Golden]

Thank you for the information. :)I feel kind of silly for not checking this earlier, but I found the location tab, now that I'm actually on my Windows 7 system. (I was posting from my Linux system earlier.) I see that method listed above. So far it's worked the way I want it, but we'll see over time how well it sticks. I don't use Outlook, so the .pst files I don't believe would be a worry for me. I don't mind leaving the user folder on the system drive, I mostly just wanted to have most of it stored somewhere else.

Using the method described will automatically make the needed registry entry changes.I have all my data folders mapped to a separate partition and that is where the files reside.Makes it easier to reinstall Windows if I need to.Actually it keeps my Win 7 footprint small ~11 GB out of 23 GB so that I can more easily maintain a system imagethat I can restore in case of disaster.

[FuzzButt]

My Win 7 install is much larger than that and I allow my installations to reside on my C:" drive but that is all. I currently have 60GB on my "C:". It's an 80GB SSD and it is nearly full. Works very well this way though.

[Frank Golden]

My Win 7 install is much larger than that and I allow my installations to reside on my C:" drive but that is all. I currently have 60GB on my "C:". It's an 80GB SSD and it is nearly full. Works very well this way though.

I should have added that almost all my apps are installed to the same partition (U:\)as my library folders.I had done this over time and rather haphazardly when I had a Win 7\XP dual boot (XP data was stored there as well).I recently reinstalled (clean installed) Win 7 and eliminated XP so I also cleaned the U:\ of all data, after saving my personal data and installed my programs and apps to U:\Program Files and mapped my libraries to that folder as well.The end result is that my U:\ partition can be completely copied off site as an incremental backup (I use Retrospect 7.6 to automate this) and my C:\ partition is regularly imaged with Clonezilla Live.The much smaller Win 7 footprint on my C:\ partition makes the imaging process much quicker (about 10 minutes) with the resulting image about 5 GB.In the event of drive failure I pop in a new drive and partition it exactly like the old and use Clonezilla to restore C:\ and copy my off site U:\ backup making sure Win 7 sees that partition as U:\.Back in business.I can (an have) used this method to migrate to a larger drive.