How To Move Your Home Folder To Another Drive

in xp if you want to move your "my documents" folder just go to:
start
right click my documents
and change the "target folder location"
i have it on my second drive so when i format i dont waste time copying everything

@TheOtherHalf: In windows (xp, but I assume vista could be done similarly) I usually just put a link from the first "My" folder or whatever and have that go to where my documents and such are actually stored. It works for me, but I'm sure that many other people have good ideas that work for them.

Dang, when I saw the title, I was hoping this was for Vista... where we now have multiple "My " folders and they have to be moved individually, then when you DO move them, you can end up with multiple copies of your "My " folders. I have 2 "Documents", 2 "Contacts", 2 "Desktop", and 2 "Pictures" folders in my User folder, one blue and one yellow each. And don't even get me started on the AppData and Roaming folders!!!

I wish I could have just moved the "User" folder and been done with it.

You big tease.

TheOtherHalf

@eyeverve: I can vouch that this works and is really pretty simple.

Wow, I didn't think this was possible, let alone that it'd be a system option

EnzoFX

@TheOtherHalf: There's an excellent guide over at Joshua Mouch's blog that gives pretty detailed instructions on moving the entire "Users" hierarchy to a different location. I've done it on several computers (though fresh installs are best) with no problems. And just for good measure, a symbolic link that points the "old" users folder to the new one is great for stubborn apps that have the path hard-coded. (eg. C:\Users redirects to D:\Users)

[joshmouch.wordpress.com]

Terschinbrae

Where's the video?

aeronaut

@TheOtherHalf: For Vista, just right click on the respective folder within your username folder (i.e. Documents). Then select the 'Location' tab. Type the path of where you want that folder to be and you are done. All associated Vista links will lead to your new location and then shift will be transparent. The only thing that sucks is you have to do that for each folder within your username folder.

@my secret identity: Vista uses a completely different "My" schema than XP. Thanks, though!

TheOtherHalf

Oh, here is the link to moving the folders in Vista:
[www.vista4beginners.com]

Vista for beginners has a great post on how to move your user folders to another drive/partition. Note, if you are using the new Windows Mail program in Vista, you should probably leave the Contacts folder where it is.

Do NOT delete the original system files! I've done this for a couple years and I can say if you delete the original system files /home/username/, if there is any problem on log in, you are screwed. Best to leave the basic files, because if the system looks for the user, it will at least find the originals...

Max_Lux

I love thos kind of simple solutions. Here's another one, if you want to delete a system preferences pane, just right click it and select 'delete'.

i read somewhere that win 7 will allow you to make any group of folders as your music folder? can anyone confirm?

perryizgr8

This is exactly what I was looking for.

If I were to make a networked location my home directory (so 2 different computers had identical user files), what would happen when it can't connect to the network?

greimel

@Terschinbrae: Tershindbrae... thank you very much!

TheOtherHalf

In Linux, just change the /etc/passwd entry for the user to a new location. Copy/move the old files over, if you like. Or not.

Further, since NFS 1 (well before 1990), you could NFS mount almost every file/program/setting from another machine, including user HOME directories, if you like.

Obviously, this doesn't change any of the internal contents in the files, but for text-based files, that is just a `sed`, perl, awk, your-text-processing-tool-of-choice... away.

TheFu

Lifehack, you guys need to cover something like this for Linux distros as this an extremely helpful tip. :)

motang

I did this a long time ago when I had a 60GB boot drive and added another one to my old G4. The reasoning was that you could easily wipe and reinstall the OS without losing your home folder, but you'd lose any non-Apple apps you'd installed, and it didn't really work all that well in the first place. OS X really wants ~/ to be on the system drive.

Post-G4 I saw little reason to continue doing so especially with huge drives so commonplace; between SuperDuper and Time Machine I have a bootable Firewire clone and an easy way to migrate my entire system to a new Mac or new drive. So, I don't really see much benefit to doing this, and it just makes more work for you down the road.

@[ubuntu.wordpress.com]

Archive and install does what you are talking about. It moves everything to the "previous system" folder and moves the users in the user folder and all the apps that didn't come with the system back to the new OS app folder and users folder.

Philip Van Reijn

This was the first thing I did when i switched to Mac and to this day it has been perfect and problem free.
Just add a symbolic link to the new location to bypass any potential problems and you're ready to go.

I also separate my installed applications from the original ones, and it works great aswell. If the machine fails, it will become easier to recover.

Dark_Angel

What bothers me about changing default folder locations, e.g. My Documents etc.... is that I don't want other crap following me there, the way stuff gets dropped into My Documents without even getting permission to do that-- stuff that doesn't fall under the heading of "my documents". I'm trying to think of examples of this.... programs putting data folders in there without asking, rendering 'my documents' 'my documents plus their documents', if you know what I mean. I wish I could tell all the developers "keep your crap out of My Documents", and don't follow me around if I change its location.... I want a so called 'my documents' to be truly my own. No stalking me by apps.

paintbox

@TheOtherHalf: No problem. Next time I may try to be a bit more awake when posting though.

@Terschinbrae: Good on you for posting intelligently.. Thanks

@perryizgr8. In win7, it does let you make more than one directory in My Docs and I expect the same for My Music/Pics/etc... IMO 7 not baked yet....I feel they are rushing it out....I've gone back to XP.

ksplem