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Strategies for using user-data folders in Windows 7?

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InstantFundas:

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. -tranglos (January 19, 2010, 06:02 PM)
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This is exactly what I did on Win XP. Remapped "My documents" to another partition and never bothered about "My videos" and "My music". And yes there were a few programs that had trouble adapting to the change. One was Windows Live Writer from Microsoft itself. WLW stored drafts at C:\My Documents\My weblog post\ and wouldn't move to the new location. I had to create another folder on C named "My documents" as a workaround even though my actual documents folder was on another partition.

On Win 7 I haven't remapped the Documents folder. Instead I use a custom folder and added it to Libraries. I don't worry about applications using Documents folder to save program settings, as my real data is safe on another partition.

MrCrispy:
Most users don't know what a 'partition' is, and don't care. They do care that they can get to 'Documents', 'Pictures' etc from the start menu, and that all programs by default save things to well known locations such as these. The alternative - that upon installation every user would have to create their own data directory and remember to use them, is terrible. And programs still wouldn't know that documents go into a shell folder for documents.

Remapping these custom folders is easy. Only advanced users care about keeping 2 partitions for OS and data, and a normal user shouldn't be expected to have to reinstall the OS and keep the original data. If you want to do that, Windows provides plenty of ways - Easy Transfer Wizard, System Backup etc. I don't really see what the problem is with special folders.

JavaJones:
It seems that everyone totally miscontrued the intent of my suggestion, which probably means it's not intuitive anyway (although in the actual UI I think it could be made to be). Anyway, I still find file management, backup, settings storage, and transfer are not totally solved problems, and I think MS could handle them better. But the existing solutions *are* decent.

- Oshyan

phillfri:
Windows does have its history of being able to trash the OS partition, doesn't it :>)

Immediately after installing Windows 7 (clean install) I redirected the C:\Users\ folders to my D drive. All of them, including AppData for each user. I left the original C:\Users folders intact for those few programs that can't handle redirected folders. I found that Windows 7 networking and Media Player have some quirks that seem to cause issues if one doesn't redirect the entire C:\Users structure to the D: drive. And don't rename the core folders, e.g. "\Users", "\My Documents", etc.

Note: I Actually manually recreate the C:\Users folder structure on the D Drive, then I do the redirect/copy routine on the C:\Users folder and its subfolders. You may find that when redirecting the AppData folder(s) to the D drive you'll end up having to manually copy the AppData folder(s) contents to the D Drive to make sure you get it all. Some of the AppData folders contents may be in use while running Windows 7.

So I have the \Users, \Data, \Scripts, and \OSBkup folders on my D drive. This makes backing up a breeze. I use Image for Windows for timed backups of the OS partition to D:\OSBkup once a week. I use Synkron to synchronize/backup the D Drive folders to either a network or external hard drive (depending on the machine).

I've been running this setup on 5 machines, desktops and laptops, and haven't had any issues.

f0dder:
Windows does have its history of being able to trash the OS partition, doesn't it :>)-phillfri (February 11, 2010, 08:35 AM)
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Does it? Never happened to me on NT... the only times I've had bad corruption has been when writing my own (buggy!) kernel mode drivers, using flaky hardware, or 3rd-party unstable drivers (ATI and Creative, I'm pointing at you!)

On installing Windows 7 I redirected the C:\Users\ folders to my D drive. All of them, including AppData for each user. I left the original C:\Users folders intact for those few programs that can't handle redirected folders. I found that Windows 7 networking and Media Player have some quirks that seem to cause issues if one doesn't redirect the entire C:\Users structure to the D: drive. And don't rename the core folders, e.g. "\Users", "\My Documents", etc.-phillfri (February 11, 2010, 08:35 AM)
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How did you do this redirection? Unattended setup scripts, vLite, ... ?

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