Windows 7: Moving the location of the *users* folders.

Hi,

I was wondering if there was a quick way of relocating a user's directory folder to another drive without having to go into all of the individual folders' location tab in properties?

Possible: YES, Quick: NO

You can try looking here An error message informs you that you cannot move or rename the Documents and Settings folder

Though it is best to do this on a fresh install of windows before you install anything else.

Tweak 7 will let you do it easily:




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I want to change this folder only c:\users\My username

Is there a way to change this folder. I can change the subfolder with windows or with tweak 7. But i can't change my userfolder..

yes there is all you have to do is go into the user folder and just move them to the new location.

For example: I keep user files on my D drive. So I go into c:\users\mike in one explorer window then I have a folder d:\Mike I go to that in another explore window. So know I have two explorer windows open I take and right click and drag the user files from the C window to the D window and click MOVE. This will relocate all of your locations to that folder. So like when you go to start and pictures it will change that to the location you moved the folder to. Thats it...


One note I do find that in some users cases it will break IE favorites. So after I do the move I will test it by seeing if I can add a bookmark in each user if I can't then I just move the favorites back to the original location on the C drive. At that point I will create a copy on the D drive.

This is weird cause I don't have a documents and settings folder didn't they do away with that in Vista?

copernicus

Nice tip on tweak 7. Its beta but who cares.
+1 rep

Ken

I personally don't like to use a program for something I can do in about 4 clicks and 20 seconds. To each there own.. at least now you will know how to do it without a program..


BTW zigzag3143 I really like that cat..... man that things getting a work out does it ever stop doing push ups.

You can simply right click and Move most shell folders. I've never tried moving the entire /Users root like that though, because I'm in a single-user environment and I have /Desktop and /Documents folders on one of my data drives that date back to Windows 2000. It's getting silly at this point in time that Windows doesn't have an option to mount that folder to a separate partition on install. I can tell you from the limited research I did when I was interested in this, that the solutions are not pretty and involve hand-editing several reg keys.

What I just do is set up my user account and drag out the shell folders I'm interested in after install, and merge them with the permanent copies on my data partition. This is functionally the same as editing the target in the folder properties. Windows is actually pretty smart about it. The disadvantage of course is that any new users will default to the /Users hierarchy. In my case the only other account is the built in admin that I only use for escalating privilege, so there is no User data of interest anyway.

I also love how they keep flip-flopping between "My [Shell Folder]" and "[Shell Folder]," I'm guessing some mouth-breathing Vista users were confused as to whether a folder belonged to them or not and complained.

Check this out to move your user folder. I did it after a fresh install this weekend. I think it moved the public too after the first one but the second time I'm not sure.
How to Change User Profile Default Location in Windows 7 | Windows 7 Hacker

It's best to do it after a clean install so anything that is installed will use that location. Everything I installed used it. I didn't change the app data though.