New
#1
Want to change location of My Documents and My Music to secondary HDD
Being a procrastinator I have of course waited until the last minute to switch from my Win XP system to my Win 7 Home Premium system.
I built the Win 7 system using a 256 GB SSD as the system/program drive and a secondary 500 GB HDD for data, backups, etc. On my XP system I have a ton of documents, pictures and music, all of course in the My Documents folder. Transferring these files to the Win 7 system and putting them in the default My Documents, My Pictures and my Music folders would probably use up about 125 GB of the SSD space which has already been reduced to about 175 GB because of the system files and programs I have installed on the SSD to take advantage of it's speed.
As I understand it, an SSD drive's speed and efficiency decreases if the drive is over 3/4 full so I would like to locate these folders on the secondary HDD. I have researched considerably the best way to do this and I am still confused about the best way to do this.
Here is a link to an older topic in this forum that gives instructions on how to do this but it is also confusing. For instance, he states (in the Option 2 section): Create a New Folder by right clicking or press and hold on a empty space in the main window there, and click/tap on New and Folder. Name the new folder without spaces (ex: "Music" for My Music) for the user folder that you want to move there. BUT, his screenshot show's naming it My Music. Which is correct? In the same topic, he mentions (at the top of the article) a Tip: If you are just wanting to save HDD space, then you might consider this below to be able to access the files from your libraries with the files actually located where you like instead. This sounds like what I want to do but I'm not sure.
The tip above does seem to have the advantage of including the new Library items in a Windows Backup. Unfortunately I use Acronis and I'm not sure that would be the case for Acronis. No big deal, I can just create a separate backup for those folders.
It sounds to me that the two methods are:
- Physically moving the folders to the secondary HDD (per Option 2 in the linked topic).
- Creating symbolic links to them on the secondary HDD by adding them to the existing Libraries (have I stated this correctly?).
- Would I have issues with using either of the above methods because I'm using Win 7 HP and not Win 7 Pro or Ultimate?
Sorry about the length of the post and I hope it is understandable!
TIA for any replies.