My Application Data Directory is currently mapped to a directory on a network drive. The network is incredibly slow and it causes every single application which accesses that directory to freeze. I feel like I am losing about 75% of my productivity to waiting for the network to respond.
How can I remap where the application data is stored? I really don't care about losing my settings in a case where my machine fails. The loss in productivity isn't worth it. I can back up the data as needed.
This is an in-depth article on how this can be done but it is extremely tricky.
However on a corporate network the same effect can be achieved via certain Group Policies. This is controlled from a central server and will be hard to change locally. This is also the behavior when using Roaming Profiles.
This very much depends on the application itself. Some applications provide a feature to move a data directory, however many apps once installed do not provide an automated means to move the data directory.
You are rolling the dice here, but that being said, I have had success doing this in the past.
Generally this process requires you to inspect the application's configuration files within it's directory structure after ensuring that it is not running. You want to determine where the pointers to the data are located so you can change them. This is generally both files and registry entries.
If you can locate all of the references to the data in these two locations, then you can just copy the data somewhere else, update all of the path information referencing the data in config files/registry.
This is how it is done IF it can be done.
