How to move My Documents to a different partition/drive
My Documents is the default folder for saving files in many programs. And in an urge to save time or hassles, most people hit OK and save them in My Documents. All well and good.
What happens when Windows XP is somehow damaged/corrupted and has to be reformatted? You lose all your valuable files. I was in this predicament recently, but I had taken a precaution to move My Documents to another partition so that it can be salvaged.
To change the location of My Documents, right-click on My Documents icon, and click properties. Then, in the dialog box that comes up, click ‘Move’. Select a different drive. For example, if you use C: as the drive for XP, use D: or any other partition, click OK.
If you are overly paranoid of your data, you can move My Documents to a different harddrive or an external backup drive (assuming that it is always connected). That way, you can save your documents even if the harddrive with Windows XP is corrupted.
You don’t have to use the ‘My Documents’ folder at all - you could just create a folder called E:\Docs and put all your stuff there.
That’s what I did when I was on windows.
@Binny: E:\Docs is a good idea, but then I’d have to choose it every time for a save, rather than save in the default location (My Documents).
Simple tip, I too had written this on my blog.
@Binny,
This step is useful because many times when we save some documents or images, it goes to “My Documents” folder and we have the tendency to save it there. I had this experience, I lost all items in my documents folder when my XP crashed. This step would prevent it.
@Nirmal: It is a simple tip. Yes, the reason that you mentioned is behind this advice, and I wrote the same reply to Binny! See above ^^