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Strategies for using user-data folders in Windows 7?

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tranglos:
"My Documents" (now called "Documents" in Windows 7), My Music, My Videos, Downloads and all those special folders where user data is supposed to live: how do you use them? Do you use them? Ignore them? Remap them to other locations?

Starting from Win95, Microsoft have been gradually expanding the scope of these folders. In Win95 I basically ignored them completely. In XP I couldn't just ignore them anymore, because a lot of apps want to use them all the time for all kinds of data. Now Windows 7 adds more of those folders and includes them in the new "libraries". Together with the stricter permissions regime, this means it's harder than ever to avoid those folders or not use them at all.

As to why one would avoid them, here's one fine reason: data safety and your backup strategy. Every respectable backup guide these days will tell you that the most robust scenario, and one that will minimize the chance you will one day cry, is to keep your data well separated from the system and software. Good advice is, at minimum, to keep the OS and all software on your system partition, and keep all your data on a separate partition on the same disk. This is no good in case of a hardware failure, so to be safer, make it separate disk drives, not just separate partitions.

This is what I do. I feel this is the safest solution, barring a remote colo server to store backups at. It has also made it extremely quick and easy for me to go from XP to Windows 7 and back in two days, since I had exactly zero worry about my data.

(Okay, a slight exception: I also backup and restore some apps' configuration, such as Firefox bookmarks or EmEditor settings. This is a gray area somewhere between software and data, and typically you don't have much control over where it is stored, especially if it's the registry. But losing my syntax highlighting schemes wouldn't really make me cry, so let's omit that for the moment. Also, the appdata folders can be remapped, too, though I've never done that.)

Now, what does Microsoft do? Why, exactly the opposite! Microsoft creates all the specially designated folders where everyone is supposed to keep their data, and these folders are always on the same partition as the system! Who needs best practices anyway? Now nearly all applications use those folders, and meanwhile, all these years Windows has never once asked you where YOU want to keep your data. I could praise MS for improving how the folders are designed and organized, but instead I'm going to berate them: you are forced into a little pen, the pen is dangerous for you, and it takes much effort (or at least some orientation and tweaking) to escape it. With each new version of Windows, it's getting harder.

In XP I have My Documents remapped to my secondary drive, and it mostly works well - except for some rare applications where the path location is hard-coded. I've seen such apps, but I couldn't give an example right now, so I guess they're not even on my radar anymore. OTOH, I have never remapped "My music" or "My videos", and prefer to store these types of files where Windows doesn't know. Reason: any media player these days will want to continually scan and index these locations, and I don't want to have three or four or five such indexes on my system. Also, I have seen a media player that, upon first run, not only indexed mp3s, but started pulling online data and **updating tags in my files** with it, all before I had a chance to say no. (I had to restore a lot of files from backup, thanks a lot.) So I keep my media where these applications won't find them until I manually point them to the folders.

That has worked well for me in XP. But during my short-lived foray into 7, I began to wonder. Is remapping still a good idea? Do the new libraries make any difference? I thought they might make remapping obsolete, since you can just add your "real" personal folders to the default libraries instead. Yet having done that, apps would still write data to C:\users\username, and I'm not going to allow this.

So what do you do with regard to these folders? What did you do in XP or Vista, and are you doing anything different in 7? Or planning to? What's the smart thing to do?

JavaJones:
It's interesting you bring this up because I've found this to be a real mess, and getting messier despite apparent efforts to the contrary, with each new Windows version (as you also said). Quite honestly I'm sad to say my current approach is neither very clear nor very safe for my data. On my XP machines I did use the My Documents folder extensively, and never remapped it in any of my systems. I know I should have, especially now, but I never really wanted to deal with the pain of it, and preferred just to keep regular full backups (which I must honestly say I don't do properly and regularly enough anyway!).

Now with Win7 I have tried to get a bit more deliberate, I do have a lot of stuff stored in a completely separate external RAID array, which is good, but there are still a good amount of documents, videos, etc. in the default folders. I like the Libraries concept and basic functionality, but hate the remaining legacy of the "My Stuff" folders that are still pointed to by default.

In my opinion this is one of those things the Windows setup should ask you, along with time zone, keyboard layout, etc. e.g. "What is your preferred location for documents and other important user information?" Now granted that is going to be an added complexity for many, but they can always provide a good, easy default for most people, even if it is just the current behavior. As long as there is an option for others to *easily* do this *and* it is setup such that it automatically remaps other apps, old and new, that would want to use that folder. Sadly I doubt we'll see this any time soon.

Anyway I'm afraid I don't have some great strategy to share with you. But I can say that my goal at this point is to move as much as possible away from using those folders and toward my own organizational scheme on my external RAID (which I intend to then backup to another external RAID eventually as full insurance - unfortunately off-site backup is not an option for me due to 1+TB of data). I don't however intend to try moving my User folders or anything. I'll back them up in full though, and leave it at that. It's a compromise unfortunately, and I wish it weren't necessary. Surely there's a better way...

- Oshyan

nudone:
my solution: (on vista) i use MirrorFolder http://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/ and set it to do real-time mirrors of data and config files to another internal hard drive. all these "mirrored" files 'n' folders are then "backed-up" to yet another internal drive (which MirrorFolder also does for me).

it's not a freeware solution but i think the software is more than worth it ($39.00) for what it does. i know that my important stuff is always saved and duplicated - and i don't have to ever think about it as it's all done in realtime (except for the backup process).

i'll be using MirrorFolder when i start to use Windows 7. it makes the problem of file/folder locations trivial as it will mirror whichever you want to another hard drive (or even the same drive if you like).

f0dder:
IMHO it would be wrong to ask about locations for this kind of thing at system install time, since 99% of the users aren't going to need it. Power users can tweak it after install, and it might even be possible to set the locations for unattended setups.

I've got mixed about tje "My Whatever" folders - I kind thing the spaces look ugly, but it has the advantage of grouping the folders together. The biggest mistake was placing them by default outside of the documents folder... requiring you to remap each one individually. OTOH it would've been nice if MS had added these folders much much sooner, so more apps would use them... instead of each app storing it's stuff pretty much "whereever".

Stoic Joker:
The my whatever folders were moved out of the (My) Documents root because too many company networks were having issues with backing up users music file collections.

I keep all of the (work related) user documents folders redirected to the server which has a RAID 5 array & is backed up (to tape) every night. With XP I have to either split out the music/movie/etc. folders to LM so they don't waste backup time/space. With Vista/7 this is already done...and that is precisely why it is done. I don't care if a user wants to store some or all of the contents of their MP3 player/or camera on their workstation. I just don't want to have to deal with the tape media requirements to backup all that crap on a nightly basis ... Because "the company" doesn't give a damn if somebody loses their music collection :)

As an aside, most users tend to panic if they are faced with more than one of something. So for the universal (calm) simplicity of the common man... manufacturers put everything in one (drive) place. This keeps it nice and simple for clueless users & support people alike.

Think about it for a second. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. Johnny average gets to pick any letter he wants for a "data storage" partition. The box dies (as they sometimes do). Johnny hasn't a clue what a partition is...or what he chose to call it last year...

...Do you want to take that support call???   (I don't)

Some thing just have to be designed based on the lowest common denominator.

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