Move Users Folder Location in Windows 10  

THEnt said:

First, I have used your instructions to move user folders and ProgramData from the system drive to a data drive for several years, now, in various flavors of Windows 7 and in Windows 8/8.1 (not Pro). Thanks so much for publishing these guides. I find myself referring to them repeatedly.

Second, (and this is where people should not do what I did, just in case you're not as lucky as I was), I had an interesting experience upgrading a Windows 7 Ultimate machine, today. I forgot to sysprep ProgramData on that machine back to the C drive before starting the upgrade from the Get Windows 10 icon. When I remembered, it was too late to do anything about it, and I expected it to fail.

It succeeded, to my surprise, and the upgrade moved ProgramData, except for an empty folder (D:\ProgramData\HP\HP Officejet Pro 8610\HP XPS Raster PCL3 Driver\XmlFileCache), back to the C drive during the process. My guess is that that particular folder is not needed by Windows 10.

Hi Tracy, welcome to Ten Forums. I appreciate you joining us in order to be able to share your experience :)

A relocated ProgramData system folder has been an issue when upgrading. Its "alias", environmet variable referring to it reveals its true purpose: try entering variable %allusersprofile% in File Explorer address bar and hit Enter, you will be taken to C:\ProgramData. It works as AppData for all users, applications storing there the shared AppData, storing the user specific data then in %userprofile%\AppData. It is crucial to many applications, therefore I still recommend to manually move it back to C: when upgrading from Windows 7.

However, Windows 10 gets better and better with every build. It's only about a year since we have been able to upgrade from 7 or later even with relocated Users folder, now Windows 10 upgrade takes care of moving ProgramData back to C:. I will still wait some time before removing the warning and instructions from this tutorial.

Anyway, nice to hear the success stories :)

Kari

Dan95 said:

I am sorry if this question was already answered on previous page, but i am in middle of windows reinstall and browsing and reading 60+ pages of replies on my phone isnt very quick.
To my question... I plan to install clean windows 10 (first method) and I wanted to ask if I really need to empty/format the whole disk I will be moving my Users folder to. I use this disk to store my personal data and I also have backups of data from previous installs there (renamed copy of Users folder). I have nowhere to put that data at the moment. What should I do?

How Dan, welcome to Ten Forums.

Two suggestions, choose whatever suits you better:

1.) Repartition the disk where your data is now and which you want to use for Users folder, shrinking the existing partition and creating a new partition in the freed space. Use this new partition then to relocate the Users folder

2.) Create a new folder on your data drive, name it as you wish, move everything to that folder so that the root of the drive only contains a single folder. You can then move everything back to root when you have installed Windows and relocated the users folder

Kari

Dan95 said:

Thank you for your quick reply Kari. I will probably use the second method. But since I have all my data on that drive and I dont have unfortunately any backup of them at the moment, I have to ask: have you tried it yourself? Is there any change it will all go wrong? I really dont want to lose any data.

Please allow me to answer that by quoting an earlier discussion in this thread:

Kari said:

ShezaEU, about the topic we discussed earlier, if the target drive should be empty or not.

ShezaEU said:

Secondly, is it actually necessary to have the target drive be completely empty? I have files on it that I don't want to remove, but are not critical (in case they get deleted somehow). But is it a necessity that the drive be totally empty? It would save me many, many hours re-downloading my Steam library, for example.

Thanks in advance, I hope you can answer my queries!

It is not absolutely necessary.

I apologize now, I do not want to sound patronizing, just lazy , but the fact is that telling you geeks (some of you have never done anything like this) to be sure the target disk or partition is empty, I have saved a lot of unnecessary answering to posts with issues.

In fact you can even have the user profiles from several Windows installations on the same target disk. I've had a triple boot Windows 7 / 8.1 / 10 system where the user profiles of all three operating systems have been relocated to same disk. It requires some tweaking but it can be done.

Based on the above, this is "the official statement", the scenario I promise to work and promise to support and give assistance when something does not work as expected:

• Be sure to backup all your personal, important data from the target disk to a safe location and finally make the disk empty
• If the above is not possible, be sure move all files from the root of the disk to folders (when opened in Explorer, the disk should only show folders, no files)
• Be sure the target disk does not contain any system files and folders from any other Windows installation
• Be sure the target disk has enough space free for your Users folder

What the above means: If you have no external storage to backup the disk and make it empty, you proceed at your own risk. It will work, though, in most cases, this is just me being cautious. If (unlikely) something happens, I will not accept responsibility, being accused of your lost Steam library :)

Another member has posted this:

86nymets said:

Just wanted to let you know I figured out my issue. It had something to do with the files and folders that were already on the drive I was moving the profiles to. I moved all of the data off of the drive and formatted it and then followed the steps again and everything worked perfect and no security warnings. I then moved my data back to the drive without any issues. Probably something to do with the owner and user accounts on the folders from the previous Windows 10 install. Thanks for the tutorial and support.

Kari

Dan95 said:

Thank you again for such a quick response. I just did what you advised and it seems to worked flawlesly. My Users directory is moved and my files seem to be untouched. There are some owner problems with backup of my old Users folder but I think quick recursive takeown will fix that. I will finish installing rest of the stuff and let you know if everything worked.

The owner issue is exactly what my previous post, quote from an earlier conversation was about. Good to see you take it like a sportsman, with an fatalistic approach :)