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I recently had to do a clean reinstall of my OS and took the opportunity to get my first solid state drive. The plan is to have my OS and programs on the SSD, and all my files on the mechanical drive. Unfortunately when the OS was installed it placed the Users folder on the SSD by default; I was expecting to be able to put it on the other drive. My research suggests it's not simple to just move that to another drive, so I probably need another solution.
My question is how do people usually set up hard drives such that OS is on one and files on the other? I just want to have all my files in the one place, and for the OS, libraries, programs, etc, to be able to find them ok without me having to manually tell it where to go every time. Is there a way to make it so that every time a program/etc tried to open the C:/Users/MyAccount folder it would automatically open the E:/Users/MyAccount folder? Or is there an easier/better way to do this?
Ulysses
Posted 2018-10-11T12:40:39.050
Reputation: 113
IMHO, instructions for moving a profile folder (a single profile, not all of C:\Users) only seem complex. Which method were you referring to -- editing the registry, or creating symlinks? – user1686 – 2018-10-11T14:53:51.407
I've since discovered this tutorial to do pretty much exactly what I was trying to do: https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/87555-user-profile-change-default-location.html I worked through it and found it to be about 90% accurate. It just needed a few extra steps at the end to give the new account folders privacy so only the owner could access them. For now things seem to be ok, but there might be a good reason why people don't normally do this? I'll report back later if I have issues arise. Can anyone suggest any potential issues to keep an eye out for?
– Ulysses – 2018-10-11T15:46:21.243I should add that the above tutorial was relatively simple for me as I had few programs installed, and my files hadn't yet been added to the computer. For someone with a more established machine that method may result in issues or complexities I didn't experience. – Ulysses – 2018-10-11T15:49:44.893
I just left users alone and only re-direct downloads,documents, and etc to another drive. This minimize breakages, and leaves 6gb in my profile directory with dozens and dozens of installed apps. There could be other reference in the registry to c:\users\me and you would have to replace that with e:\users\me. The more programs you install, the great numbers of registry entries one has to change. – cybernard – 2018-10-12T02:37:59.217
It's now been 10 days and there are no noticeable issues with regard to the above solution I implemented. I have however kept a folder at C:/Users/MyAccount, which is used automatically by some programs for hidden settings files and similar. But I also have the E:/Users/MyAccount folder, which is used for everything else, and is correctly detected by the computer and programs as the profile folder. Since everything appears to be working, this issue can be considered solved. – Ulysses – 2018-10-21T04:23:47.590