How in the Tech

Easily moving the My Documents folder in Windows 7

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 30, 2010 ⋅ Tags: File Management, Windows 7

Windows users are familiar with the special folders My Documents, My Music, etc – they are stored on the drive Windows is installed on and are the default locations for most most media content and other assorted files pertaining to the current user profile. The general idea behind these folders is to assist users in maintaining some sort of order and logical storage of their personal files – generally speaking if you accept everyone applications default behavior you will find a majority of the created content under these folders. This makes it quite easy to locate files at a later date as well as simplifying the back-up process – back up these folders and you can be reasonably assured that all your valuable files are safe.

So why would you be interested in relocating these folders? Solid-state drives are gaining increased popularity every day mainly by their huge performance gains over the traditional hard drive and while prices have dropped through the last year or so, the capacity of the drives limit their use to just the essential  bits of your PC. Quite frankly, you probably are only going to be running Windows and a subset of your applications and games from a SSD as 30 or even 60GB fills up quickly! Therefor, longer term storage should be overloaded to something with a larger capacity and cheaper cost per gigabyte. My Documents/Music have the propensity to quickly suck up gigabytes so it’s logical to look at relocating them to the cheaper, but slower, storage.

Before Windows 7, relocating these directory locations involved editing the registry or creating symlinks to a new location. The alternative solution was to consciously redirect any circumstance that referenced the special folders to another location on a per application basis – for example, changing your iTunes music folder away from My Music from within the iTunes application. However, with Windows 7 Microsoft has actually made the relocation process dead simple!

From Windows Explorer, navigate to the special folder you wish to move – it’s located under c:\Users\<username>.

Right-click on the folder and select Properties.

Switch to the Location tab and notice the Move button below the default path.

Clicking Move will open an Explorer dialog where you can browse to a new location; alternatively you can manually key in the path in the form field on the Location tab.

You will be prompted on the option of having Windows move all the files from the old to the new location – you most likely want to do this so click Yes and let Windows do it’s thing.