Solo Technology

Here’s a simple little tip for the Windows users. Your My Documents folder need not live on your boot drive. You can easily move it to another drive. I’ve been doing this for years to help isolate myself from drive failures and sleep better knowing that if my boot/OS/Apps drive gets toasted I won’t lose all my data.

With the recent rebuild of my current machine, I found myself yet again moving My Documents. At which time I realized that there are folks who don’t know how simple it is to do — and if your machine has multiple drives, there’s really no reason not to do this.

Step 1: Create a new destination directory on your data drive. Me? I go with good ol’ “My Documents” at the root of the drive, but I’m simple. You could call it “Fred” if you want. Feeling zany? You can even put it on a mapped network drive. (Be warned that if the machine hosting said networked drive isn’t on or disconnected, your life will get uncomfortable.)

Now, visit properties of your current My Documents shortcut (right-click on it, choose “Properties” as shown below):

The properties dialog is very simple. Make sure you’re on the Target tab. Click “Move…” and follow the prompts:

Oh, and you can create a destination folder from here if you skipped past the first step of this article.

Select the new folder, Windows will offer to copy over everything and you’re pretty much done.

If you have a My Documents shortcut on the desktop, check properties for it as well. I’ve seen the shortcuts get out of sync from each other in some cases.

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