When the enormous capacity of today’s disk drives became cheap and common place, the notion of juggling folders across multiple drives in order to free space has disappeared. However, SSD has taken the high-end computing market by storm, promising orders of magnitude increases in I/O over traditional mechanical hard drives. The lone draw back, outside of cost, is the size constraint. As such, SSD is typically reserved for your operating system and a few key applications while everything else is off loaded to a more traditional data store. Unfortunately, many programs love to default their temp, scratch directories, cache, etc. to the main system drive. Before long you will find your SSD packed to the gills with what is effectively … junk.

I’ve written before about relocating cache folders off of the main drive, either through the application’s preference system or more technically involved – symbolic links with mklink. Briefly, symbolic links or junction points are somewhat like Windows shortcuts in that they offer a sort of redirection to another location but differ in that they are a bit more transparent to the user and other applications. Windows can reference c:\iTunes even though the folder is symlinked to another disk drive, for example.

The command line utility mklink is confusing for most users – if only because it involves dropping to a command prompt. Symbolic Link Creator is a GUI that sits atop mklink, providing a comforting interface for most novice users while still providing the power and flexibility that mklink introduces.

Usage is extremely straightforward: select the type of symlink, the location where you want your link to point, and the real folder you want to link.

Using the iTunes music directory example from above the process would involve:

  • moving the c:\iTunes folder to it’s new destination within Windows Explorer – say d:\Media\Music
  • where you want your link to point then becomes the now non-existent c:\iTunes
  • and the real folder you want to link becomes d:\Media\Music

Simple enough?

Download Symbolic Link Creator