Where
@Stoic Joker says:
...I did notice a bunch of other stuff that had quietly gone missing after the last upgrade. I have a group of small no install utilities I've always kept in C:\Program Files\Mini-Tools really just to keep root C cleaner since they had to go somewhere, and I didn't want them to be scattered about. When I went looking for one of them this weekend, I discovered that the entire Mini-Tools folder was missing/had been skipped during the upgrade. It was still retrievably in the Windows.old folder, but why the upgrade took it upon itself to deem that unworthy of migration is rather perplexing.
Now here's the weird part ... While both are configured identically, my office computer moved the Mini-Tools folder during the upgrade that my home computer skipped.
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-Stoic Joker
- I suspect that the mistake we all make is to let Windows dictate to us that we put
any program files that we wished to control, into either:
- C:\Program Files\, or
- C:\Program Files (x86)\
Recognising years back that the Windows OS did and probably always would take a somewhat proprietary control over those folders, I had always maintained a directory
C:\UTIL\ which contains catalogued "type" directories (e.g.
C:\UTIL\PIM\Infoselect) holding
all of the no-install and installed programs that I use that are
not Microsoft software (e.g., including FARR and all its associated plugins, Autohotkey, Firefox, and InfoSelect), with the sole exceptions being any program which:
- (a) seemed to have a dumb "no options" installation proggie that insisted on everything being installed into its own special explicit directory (e.g., Google Chrome Canary wants to be in C:\Users\UserID\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome SxS\Application\), or
- (b) had to install only in the usual explicit proggie directory (i.e., C:\Program Files\, or C:\Program Files (x86)\), or
- (c) which could not work properly if you moved it out of any of those explicit directories once it had been installed there.
This means that when I want to migrate to another computer, I simply port the
C:\UTIL\ directory across to the new computer, and pretty soon I have most of the proggies I can't live without, running on the new computer.
I also have several directories numbered Workdata.001, ...002, ...003, etc. which hold just operational data files and databases used by the proggies in
C:\UTIL\, so that those files are not buried in any given user's "AppData" directory (or whatever the default happens to be in the currently installed Windows OS). This makes the data backup really simple.