Can I redirect my Shared Documents folder?

[Royk]

Can I redirect my Shared Documents folder from C: to another drive. My pictures and music have left me with only 3 gig of free space and certain utilities won't work now due to the lack of space.



Roy

 

[fest3er]

Not sure if you can do that; it might be hard-coded in Windows, or it might require using RegEdit. But you can create a folder on another drive and share that folder (right-click the folder and select Sharing... ). Next, move the contents of your Shared Docs folder to that other folder. Then create a shortcut to that mew folder on your desktop so you can easily access it. Creating a shortcut in Shared Docs to the new folder might automatically bring others to the new location; in this case, you might not need the shortcut on your desktop.

 

[Missouri Mule]

Sounds like you need a External Hard Drive. Office Max has a few, they put them on sale pretty often. I bought one with 500 GB (on sale and the last I checked they lowered the prices).

 

[Royk]

Sounds like you need a External Hard Drive. Office Max has a few, they put them on sale pretty often. I bought one with 500 GB (on sale and the last I checked they lowered the prices).

I have tons of free drive space, it just isn't on C:\.



Fest3er, I thought about doing what you said, but thought it would be cleaner to redirect it. Shared Documents actually lives on the root of the directory tree as if it were a drive. I'll probably do what you said, unless someone else chimes in with a way to do it the other way.



Roy

 

[mberry]

Yes you can. It will move your stuff wherever you want it to be for you if you want it to.

 

[Royk]

Yes you can. It will move your stuff wherever you want it to be for you if you want it to.

Yes, I can what? Redirect the folder to another drive? If so, how?



Roy

 

[mberry]

Yes you can redirect it to any other drive you want.

Right click and then select Properties

Click the Move button and choose where you want to put it.

Sorry for being so vague before.

You can also run your disk cleanup wizard to clean some space off your hard drive. I'm not sure if that wizard does these or not, but deleting all your MS update folders will free up a lot of space.

You can also get a little utility that I really like called Crap Cleaner. It will do a very good job of making free space and is about 1000% faster than the disk cleanup wizard built into XP. I even use it on my servers once in a while. Best of all, it's free.

 

[Royk]

I assume you mean right click on the Shared Document folder. When I do and select Properties, I don't see any Move button. All I see are General and Sharing tabs, and neither has anything about moving. I guess I should have mentioned I'm running XP Home SP2 with all updates. I try to keep things clean and have Diskeeper running for me daily.



I ran Disk Cleanup before ever posting and it did very little for me. I'm interested in the update files you mentioned. Disk Cleanup doesn't address this. Could you elaborate? Ive also noticed there are a jillion folders under Windows that appear to all be uninstall programs for all the updates. I assume it's safe to delete these as long as they all are working.



As soon as I post this I'm going to get Crap Cleaner and see what that does for me.



My biggest concern though is to redirect the Shared Documents.

 

[Missouri Mule]

You should be able to bring up C drive (with shared documents folder) bring up the drive you want it to go in(split the screen) click on it and drag the Shared documents folder to the other drive. Delete the shared document folder in C. (Make sure it is in the other drive before deleting).

Then see if it works the way it needs to if if doesn't click on it and drag it back to C drive.

 

[klenger]

You can make any folder a shared folder by changing it's sharing properties. I'm not sure what you mean by redirect.

 

[mberry]

It may be the difference between home and pro versions but I believe you mean your My Documents folder? In pro, that's the default for documents, music, photos, video etc. .

Sorry I can't help more. I only use Pro and I haven't seen a home version of XP since the last of the VP44 Cummins' were new.

 

[Royk]

Missouri Mule,



Windows will not allow it to be moved or renamed. I had already tried that.



Windows says, "Documents is a Windows system folder and is required for Windows to run properly. It can not be moved or renamed. "

You can make any folder a shared folder by changing it's sharing properties. I'm not sure what you mean by redirect.

Shared Documents is a Windows XP system folder and you will find it in the root of the directory tree separate from other drives (even though it actually lives on C: drive). It is not like any other folder that you have set as shared, of which I have several. Anything stored in Shared Documents is automatically available to every user account on the PC and on all of the network. By redirect, I mean that I want Windows to assign this system folder to another drive other than C:.



If it can't be redirected to another drive, it seems foolish to me. The idea of the Shared Docs folder is to have a dedicated folder right up front that anyone can access (like computer illiterate wives) without hunting around. To limit it to C:, which quickly fills up with all the aftermarket programs one installs, there is soon little space left for storage hungry files like family pictures, music and video.



Roy

 

[Royk]

It may be the difference between home and pro versions but I believe you mean your My Documents folder? In pro, that's the default for documents, music, photos, video etc. .



Sorry I can't help more. I only use Pro and I haven't seen a home version of XP since the last of the VP44 Cummins' were new.

I posted that last reply and saw your new message.



No, I'm talking about Shared Documents, not My Documents which is the default only for your user account. Yes, XP has a move option for My Documents, but not Shared Docs.



Roy

 

[fest3er]

As usual, Google is your friend; at least he treats *me* decently. A search for:

  move "shared documents" to another drive

return as its first result:

 [url="http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t84794.html"]Link to mfsn.org[/url]

which contains, near the bottom, the link:

  [url="http://windowsxp.mvps.org/sharedfolders.htm"]link to mvps.org[/url]

which explains the process needed to successfully move (perhaps more correctly 'relocate') Shared Documents as well as the 'Common *' sub-folders.



N

 

[Royk]

Now why didn't I think of Googling?! Thank you so much. I knew there had to be a way to do it, and I figured it would be a bit more involved than just dragging and dropping.



Roy