Moving "MyDocuments" to D drive, did not free up space. Why is that?

Somewhat related to my previous question.

So I ran out of space on my primary C drive (I'm using Windows 7), and choose to move all of "my documets" folder locatoin to d:\ drive, thought it would be free up 7GB of space that it was taking on C drive.

I ran windirstat before and after and it is exactly the same. Moving "My Documents" to D drive did not work. Am I missing anything.

Interesting if I try to move MyDocument location to default c:\ it throws error, not enough free space. What is wrong, is WinDirStat is reporting wrong but obviously I dont see any any free up space in my C drive after moving documents.

hk_

Posted 2018-07-18T08:23:06.667

Reputation: 1 878

Did you use the "Move" button, or did you just manually edit the path? – user1686 – 2018-07-18T08:24:56.987

go to my document location, click properties, location and edit path to d:, which prompted do you want to move these files and I said yes. – hk_ – 2018-07-18T08:25:34.167

manually 'edit' the path and click ok. I now tried the 'move' button too, same result. – hk_ – 2018-07-18T08:30:40.450

BUT there is no 'previous version' information in the folder. Out of frustration, I moved one folder (6.6GB) to "D:\my documents D" folder and even that did not have the affect 6.65GB folder - size

– hk_ – 2018-07-18T10:23:22.703

Are you sure D isn't simply an "alias" for a directory or for a virtual volume? Check on diskmgmt.msc how your partitions are arranged – DDS – 2018-07-18T10:39:32.097

@DDS it sure is a folder :) But I will double check – hk_ – 2018-07-18T10:52:39.957

so if it's a folder, you discovered why moving data to it wwon't reduce used on C – DDS – 2018-07-18T10:57:46.513

That's why the question 1) Moving my document location didn't do anything 2) and moving individual big folder didn't do anything 3) and I can't move it back to C drive either. – hk_ – 2018-07-18T11:00:03.410

So now I see 2.45GB free though, which should be 7GB but at least I got some free space, changes were made hours ago. I was also able to change location to default [-6.65GB folder moved already] – hk_ – 2018-07-18T11:05:10.640

Answers

I don't exactly know what happened

I first tried to changed location of 'my documents' folder by clicking properties->location and then 'edit locaton', change the path to D: While I did moved the files but size on drive c: did not change.
Then I manually moved one big folder which was 6.65GB to d: but even that did not change anything. I restarted by PC, no effect. It was the same.
I tried to change 'my documents' location to default but was not successful because there was simply no space

Later

After this I gave it a break, after about 2 hours, I tried to change the location of 'my documents' folder and yes this time it moved back. I check the size of drive c: and yes it had 2.45GB free. At least some success.

Then I ran windirstat and it still showed those big folder 6.65GB on C drive which in fact I moved by hand to d drive. Since I already had a copy of it on D (I verified), I deleted it from C drive and now I have about 8 GB of free space which I needed to update visual studio.

Success but I don't know how? These are windows after all.

hk_

Posted 2018-07-18T08:23:06.667

Reputation: 1 878

Another way to do this is to open Registry Editor and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\

Shell Folders
User Shell Folders

enter here the path you need

eg:

Desktop = D:\Users\MyUserName\Desktop
Personal = D:\Users\MyUserName\Documents

And after that manually move the files to the new location

Remus Rigo

Posted 2018-07-18T08:23:06.667

Reputation: 2 623

Isn't that exactly what the settings in the Location tab do? – Laurence Payne – 2018-07-19T20:32:26.843

yes, but this is the manual procedure, in case the other fails – Remus Rigo – 2018-07-20T12:19:51.263