For a long time, I really really hated the whole "My Documents" thing about windows.
Mostly just because of how obscenely restrictive it was (and how much it SUCKED in Pocket PC).
But, I've actually really grown to love it over the last few months - because of the incredible abstraction it provides.
Case in point. I'm getting ready to throw Vista Beta 2 on my box. I've got a 60GB HD on my laptop (and a few external USB drives) which up until an hour ago I had configured with 4 partitions roughly like so:
C: 20 GB
D: 6 GB (All of my real 'data' - stored off of the system partition to make re-installs tons easier)
E: 24 GB (data/music/MSDN ISOs, etc)
F: 8 GB (second system partition)
Well, control freak that I am, I wanted to put both of my 'system' partitions back to back (i.e. C & D, not C & F). So... I:
1) Copied all data out of D, E, and F on to a USB Backup.
2) Changed the location of My Documents (which WAS at D:\My Documents) temporarily to C:\Documents and Settings\Mike\My Documents. (Just right click on your My Documents folder in Windows Explorer, select Properties, and you can specify where the 'guts' of this folder will live - you can even have it copy 'your documents' to the new location if desired.)
3) Repointed my Desktop to C:\Documents and Settings\Mike\Desktop from D:\Desktop using the Special Folders management do-hickie in Tweak UI.
Once all of that was taken care of, I:
4) Destroyed the Partitions by right-clicking My Computer | Manage | Disk Management, and then just right clicking D, E, and F to Delete them (gulp).
5) Used the Disk Management interface to create three new partions, leaving me roughly with the following:
C: 20 GB
D: 8 GB (second system partiton - close to the primary system partion... ahhhh order)
E: 16 GB (data - accessible to BOTH system partitions, but not sandwitched between them)
F: 12 GB (more data)
6) Copied all of my files back to their NEW homes.
7) Repointed "My Documents" to E:\My Documents\ and repointed my Desktop to E:\Desktop.
The benefit? Once I did all of that everything works PEACHY. I had to update a number of my Slick Run magic words - but that was a sinch. Otherwise, NOTHING. I didn't miss a beat.
I initially started cramming ALL of my stuff in to my "My Documents" folder about 9 months ago - just because it made backups a lot easier (and keeping them OFF of the System Drive (C:\) make reformatting/fdisk-ing absurdly simple). But tonight I was impressed by just how well using that 'abstraction' of "My Documents" pays off. (i.e. iTunes still knows what music I own, Visual Studio still knows where to find all of my projects, etc, etc, etc.)
Looking back at this post a day later, I'm pretty sure it's incoherant - as in I never really made my point:
If your applications use paths like "%My Documents%"\My Projects or "%My Documents%"\My Music, then the understanding is that the SYSTEM knows how to resolve the 'root' of that request, and handles the rest for you. And, since you can move that around super easily, that makes for excellent flexibility. (which was my point...)
Posted by: Michael K. Campbell | May 24, 2006 at 08:24 AM
UPDATE (though no one will read this):
Turns out Visual Studio 2005 sucks - and doesn't play by the rules. While it appears that it can find the My Documents folder correctly - beware as it will SAVE new projects to the last hard-coded path used - meaning it will cram them to the old location.
Posted by: Michael K. Campbell | May 25, 2006 at 01:09 PM