Directing data to a second drive ?

Mike100 · 04 Aug 2021

Thanks everyone for all the information.
I'll start out by using "Save As" to direct files to the D: drive, and also change where the browser saves downloads. I'll see how that works out with other family members.

Mike100 · 09 Sep 2021

dalchina said:

Hi, whilst you can use the Location tab to relocate these folders, this is not something I personally would choose to do, as I've written on a number of occasions. So once again:
a. It's possible to make the most awful mistakes very easily in getting the destination wrong - the new location. People have done this without taking the advice I asked to be added to the tutorials on this to create a disk image before using the Location tab.
b. Many common programs create their folders in the default library folders. Thus they are not entirely your folders, if you see what I mean.
c. There are one or two circumstances when having done this may create a problem in later system maintenance.
I prefer to simply create my own folders on the second disk e.g.
My Documents
My Videos
My Downloads
etc (or whatever you wish).
This is to me the simplest and least problematic approach.

If I copy old documents from my old PC to a new PC and into a new "My Documents" folder on a new D: drive, will my word processor automatically be directed to them? Or will I have to enter the D: drive path every time I want to open an old document?

dalchina · 10 Sep 2021

Thank you for your question.

Assuming your new PC's O/S was built from a clean install, and you then install your Office suite/WP, then your WP program will have no recent documents list at all, if that's what you're referring to.

Mike100 · 10 Sep 2021

dalchina said:

Thank you for your question.

Assuming your new PC's O/S was built from a clean install, and you then install your Office suite/WP, then your WP program will have no recent documents list at all, if that's what you're referring to.

Correct it is a new install of Windows 10. Old documents will get copied to the D: storage drive.

Currently on my old PC, MS Word opens or saves to My Documents on the C: drive by default. Can MS Word's default filepath be changed to My Documents on the D: drive? I didn't see any option for that.

I can always find a document, but would like to make this foolproof for other family members.

dalchina · 10 Sep 2021

If you look in the screenshot under point 6. under the highlighted box there seems to be an appropriate option 'Default local file...'

How to save Office documents to This PC by default on Windows 10 | Windows Central

(I don't use Word myself).

Mike100 · 10 Sep 2021

Thanks -
I saw that before but my old version of Word does not have a Files > Options selection. However I found something under Tools > Options.> File Locations > Modify that looks like it should work.

Barman58 · 10 Sep 2021

I use the system as designed - use the locate option to move the various user folders to the data drive, and ... it just works. Word and excel and other applications are hard coded to save to the documents folder which the location system handles the relocation so the end up (in my Case in D:\ My Stuff \documents

If I am working on a particular project, I can still use save as and navigate to a project folder on another drive.

If you are dealing with a multi user device simply create a user tree for each user on the data drive and use locate to redirect the files ( the function is user based ( I think it's also present in the Public folders so you could relocate that too. as the administrator of the system if you wish to create a monument for another user, just use save as and save to the data drive location - or better for easy access the Public access folder on the dat drive.

For those with a more technical nature, the system uses a system similar to the Symbolic Link system used on many operating systems so it's not some new untried system.

My data drive is backed up regularly, as is my system drive, I have in the past had need to restore both and each individually of these folders on systems and they still worked perfectly after the restore.

The most dangerous potential issue is that to sources are relocated to the same secondary location you can undo this with a simple registry tweak but the files have to be moved manually - of course you can cause damage from other lapses in concentration