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I've recently installed Windows 8 on my system and configured it to dual boot with Windows 7 I already had. Now I'm wondering there is a way to tell windows I want both my user accounts in each of Windows instances to share same location as their home folder?

So far I've tried changing home folder location, which didn't provide satisfying results. since I have to change location of documents, videos, etc. one by one. While what I was looking for was to change the environment variable %HOME%.

I can also try creating symlink, using mklink. with this method everything will work as expected but with one minor issue, my Win8 user doesn't have privileges to edit anything in Win7 home folder. it's as simple as the user defined in win7 in unknown for Win8 and vise versa, so simply giving extra privileges to the home folder won't solve anything. I need to somehow tell windows these users are exactly the same.

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  • I'm not sure it's a good idea to have Windows 8 and Windows 7 to share profile folders. Every version of Windows (in the past, at least) had a unique folder structure for the user profile. But perhaps you could solve this if both OSes are in the same domain?
    – Wally
    Aug 1, 2013 at 14:46
  • Personally, I would instead just add the Documents/Pictures/Videos/Downloads/etc. to the "library" of each (or simply change the location using the Right Click > Properties > Location (If I recall)), that way you don't mess with profile stuff that may or may not have changed. That way, the important pieces of your files are around but the windows specifics are separated.
    – nerdwaller
    Aug 1, 2013 at 14:50
  • What you wan't isn't posssible. Each profile would be entirely seperate because of permissions. Windows respects Windows permissions. The solution is to have a shortcut to a seperate permission outside of the Profile directory. Trying to change the behavior of the User profile system is simply a bad idea. There is no way to tell Windows the Users are exactly the same because they are not, even if they are the same username, the GUID are different.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 1, 2013 at 15:03
  • @nerdwaller not all of my data are located in libraries, some are located directly in user profile.
    – Ali1S232
    Aug 1, 2013 at 19:13
  • @Wally both installations are using local user setting, so they can't share a domain.
    – Ali1S232
    Aug 1, 2013 at 19:13

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