medorion.net

Moving profile folders in Windows 7

Posted by Medorion on February 4th, 2010 13:25:30 UTC +1.

As I finally got all the new parts for my Pc yesterday, including but not limited to 2 160Gb Intel Postville SSD's and 4 1Tb drives for data storage. I was finally going to build and the install my new Pc!

The idea was to make a RAID0 array of the 2 Intel SSD's for my Operating System (Windows 7) and applications and configure a RAID10 array to store profile settings and data with the 4 1Tb drives. After putting everything together and doing the usual BIOS/Firmware/Windows installation and driver updates I got to the part where I would move the profile directory folders off off the RAID0 array and onto the RAID10 array.

In Windows XP this was as simple as a few mouse clicks on your 'My Documents’ folder in Windows 7 on the other hand stuff was a lot more complex.

After some tinkering I found a simple solution. In Linux I often use symbolic links for a lot of stuff so why not just do this on Windows too? Long story short here is how to move your profile folders from your Operating System drive to another drive in Windows 7.

• Create a temporary admin account and login on this account
• Move everything in the 'C:\Users' folder to your destination of choice except the directory of the admin account your currently logged on to. (I usually keep the directory structure the same so in my case I moved everything to 'D:\Users\ [UserName]')
• Now set the correct NTFS file permissions on the new location for all the profile folders you moved
• Open an elevated command prompt and type the following to make a symbolic link to the new location of your profiles 'mklink /D [SourceDirectory]' [DestionationDirectory] (in my case C:\Users\ [UserName] D:\Users\ [UserName])
• After you are done check if everything works as expected and remove the temporary admin account and it's profile directory to clean stuff up.

For me this works flawlessly, I now have my data safe on a redundant RAID10 array while my OS and applications are on a super fast RAID0 array. On top of that I do not wear out my SSD drives all that much and I do not have to worry about the minimal storage space on that array.