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Strategies for using user-data folders in Windows 7?

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Stoic Joker:
I've never really been a fan of imaging, unless you are transfering an existing system to a new HDD. On a fresh/clean install the format is not necessarily required. Using XP as an example.

Boot to WinPE (or other CLI) and on C: run the following commands
attrib *.* -h -r -s
del *.* (Just to kill the boot files) Granted this assumes no files we stored on the root of C:
ren progra~1 PROG_OLD
ren docume~1 DOC_OLD
ren Windows WIN_OLD

Reboot to XP install disk and run normal clean install - Even tho the old OS is still there, it's invisible to the installer. I do this frequently if there is a question about how/where to find drivers for oddball hardware. Or if I'm pressed for time and don't want to copy XGB of what not back and forth.

f0dder:
Imaging is much faster than a reinstall - not only the OS installation process itself, but also the task of installing (and configuring!) third party apps. I haven't done imaging for years, but I've been contemplating getting into it again... also, when I do a clean reinstall, I do want the format to get rid of any leftover junk and have a fragmentation-free clean slate.

Stoic Joker:
Imaging is much faster than a reinstall - not only the OS installation process itself, but also the task of installing (and configuring!) third party apps.-f0dder (January 21, 2010, 03:50 AM)
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True, but I've need to reinstall the OS on my primary machine once since 1999 (when Win2k came out), and that was due to a hardware (motherboard) failure. I installed Vista 3 years ago when I built this machine, then upgraded to 7 when it came out. Anything questionable is done with VMs.

I see Client machines killed in all sorts of ways on a regular basis, and they never have images or backups. So it's always a fun game to deal with the aftermath of what went wrong (hence the above solution).

I haven't done imaging for years, but I've been contemplating getting into it again... also, when I do a clean reinstall, I do want the format to get rid of any leftover junk and have a fragmentation-free clean slate.
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I'm not really sure what you mean by leftover junk...anything on the drive that is unwanted is delete-able (I assume I'm missing something). Clean installs are not fragmentation free (pagefile will be in 3-5 pieces etc.). Obviously they're less fragmented then my sudo-parallel method. But if you're a stickler for data layout (I am), it'll still need a few passes from PerfectDisk before it's bounce-a-quarter-off-the-bed tight.

Lashiec:
In XP I remapped the entire "My Documents" to the secondary drive, and had no problems, all apps made correct use of all the predefined folders the OS provides, and those who don't, create folders in the root, as they should. Will do the same in Windows 7, if it lets me do so. Kinda like the OS provides such well-thought default folders (saves me some thinking :P), and the ability to move them as you like. Linux distros have been doing the same for a while, so I guess all of them can't be wrong.

The next step would be to let users remap "Documents and Settings" aka "Users" as they see fit as well. It would make backing up program settings sooo much easier. And in the process, they could punch in the head those apps which insist on not making use of "Application Data" and store the data in a folder created in the "<username>" root (VirtualBox, I'm looking at you).

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.
-tranglos (January 19, 2010, 06:02 PM)
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What kind of nasty media players are you using? :S

f0dder:
I haven't done imaging for years, but I've been contemplating getting into it again... also, when I do a clean reinstall, I do want the format to get rid of any leftover junk and have a fragmentation-free clean slate.
--- End quote ---
I'm not really sure what you mean by leftover junk...anything on the drive that is unwanted is delete-able (I assume I'm missing something).-Stoic Joker (January 21, 2010, 06:00 AM)
--- End quote ---
System Volume Information :)

Clean installs are not fragmentation free (pagefile will be in 3-5 pieces etc.).-Stoic Joker (January 21, 2010, 06:00 AM)
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True - and iirc you can't even get rid of pagefile + hibernation files when doing unattended setups... iirc it's possible to edit the pre-configured hive files so they should be disabled pre-install, but at least one of them gets generated anyway (agian, iirc).

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