I have a Windows 7 system which contains a ProgramData
folder on drive C.
I now need to completely move this folder from drive C to drive D.
What is the best way to do this?
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Sign up to join this communityI have a Windows 7 system which contains a ProgramData
folder on drive C.
I now need to completely move this folder from drive C to drive D.
What is the best way to do this?
The system drive can't be D
; it has to be C
.
You can move data from one HD to another
or move data from one partition to another.
You need to use clone software to do this.
However if you want to move or change ProgramData
,
There is nothing important in
ProgramData
that would not be recreated by the various applications you install. It is just application configuration data.The default path is
C:\ProgramData
. It is stored here:HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProgramData
OPTIONS:
- You can change your default ProgramData path to be an alternative drive. Although doing so, all new users that are created will use the new programdata path. So you may end up having two
ProgramData
folders at the end of the data.Alternatively, you could use “NTFS Junction Points”. Not many people know of this, but a junction point is a way to force all programs that write to path (
C:\ProgramData
) to be redirected to (D:\ProgramData
). This is how old programs designed for XP can easily work with Vista and Windows 7 new folder locations (Documents and settings
replaced withUsers
).So you could create a junction point specifically for the tmp directory that is created by the GR.
mkdir D:\ProgramData robocopy /XJ /MIR "C:\ProgramData" "D:\ProgramData" mklink /J "C:\ProgramData" "D:\ProgramData"
The downside is that Windows Update does not work well with program data on a separate drive. See Relocation of the Users directory and the ProgramData directory to a drive other than the drive that contains the Windows directory.
D:\ProgramData
folder and then created junction points for only the sub-folders within C:\ProgramData
that took up the largest amount of space. This meant that the majority of programs still benefited from running on C (the SSD) whilst the big things (such as Office, Steam and Visual Studio) sat on D.
– Richard
Jan 7 '14 at 14:37
mklink /J
responds "Cannot create a file when that file already exists."
– fat_mike
May 28 '18 at 23:24
C:\ProgramData
after the Robocopy command
– intrixius
Dec 31 '18 at 9:01
Could you explain your reasoning?
Here is a good reference on how to do it but it requires a re-install
Paragon Migrate to SSD is another option..