Relocating Users Folders

I'm using Windows 7 Home Premium. I have already relocated my Documents to a separate partition on my laptop's HD. I am considering also relocating the entire Users Folder to this separate partition in order to make it easier to reimage my system volume without fear of overwriting important user data. I recently had to revert to a month-old image of the system volume, and before reimaging I used Easy Transfer to copy the User data off and reload it after reimaging. This worked but it got me to thinking what if my system volume had become corrupted - I could potentially lose my current User data.

I can think of a few potential issues with relocating Users Folder and would appreciate your insights into these, as well as anything else I should be aware of.



The Issues

1. If my Users Folder is relocated will it create any out-of-sync problems if I have to reimage with an older system image but keep the current Users Folder?
2. Are Windows Restore Points in any way impacted by relocating the Users Folder to a different partition or drive?

/jerry

Thanks for your quick reply. I've seen some tutorials that recommend setting up a junction point with mklink when relocating c:\Users folder so that even if applications try to read or write to the default address it will be properly redirected to the relocated folder. If you are aware of this, is there a reason why you opted not to use this technique for relocating the entire c:\Users folder?

/jerry

Well, I am not sure that what I am doing will help you, but it's an alternative.

I keep the C:\Users where it is. I don't have any of my files there. My files are in D:\, which is a separate hard drive. This way, the programs that are programmed to use C:\Users to keep their temporary files there can do so without any problem. At the same time, my own files are safe from whatever system problems, even if (god forbid) I need to re-install my OS, my files are not affected, I can always reinstall clean with hard drive re-format, but my files are on another drive and thus are not affected at all.

Now, while doing this I clearly do not keep my photos in the "My Pictures" folder, my documents (what exactly are documents, anyway?) are never in "My Documents", and so on. I never understood the need to use those pre-defined folders, so I do not use them. It takes a lot more effort to try to move them as opposed to simply create a folder "D:\photo" and put my photos there. So why bother? Can anyone tell me what's so special about these pre-defined folders? Any special functionality I am not aware of? Anything I might need to do can be done without them, or am I wrong?

Why don't you use the "Libraries" feature of Windows 7 to do exactly this. Just add/link your external folders to your libraries and you won't have to do any copying or moving at any point in time. Whenever the system screws up or is re-imaged, you'll simply link the same libraries (folders on other drives) back.

What would try to write to the default location that you couldn't change to reflect the proper external library?

I suppose it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Just a different idea, though.