During the recent launch of Windows 10 v1809 known folder redirection became a hot topic of conversation. This is because it was people who were using known folder redirection that suffered from having their data deleted during the installation of the latest release of Windows 10. If you don't know what known folder redirection is or you are suffering from a C: Drive that is almost full then the following may well be of interest to you.
Known folder redirection is of most benefit to people who have a Computer that has been partitioned between C: and D: and C: is running out of space while D: is virtually empty. Most machines that are sold today simply have one large C: Drive but it used to be fashionable to have a C: Drive for the Operating System and a D: Drive for Data. Most people didn't even acknowledge the existence of D: and therefore saved everything on C: and eventually ran out of space while there was an empty D: Drive sitting in the background. You should as a rule of thumb have at least 10% free space on your C: Drive and this is indicated by a nice blue bar in File Explorer, when the bar turns red you are starting to run into trouble and your Operating System will begin to experience problems. It will start with an initial slowing down and if you eventually use every last Megabyte of space you can get to the situation where the Computer may not even boot. The other people who will benefit from KFR are people who have bought machines with SSD drives installed and have sacrificed space for speed.
Let us assume the bar in your C: Drive has turned red and you are beginning to run into trouble what should you do? There are a few different things you can do but as we are covering KFR in this article that is what I will cover here. Known folder redirection is the process of re-mapping the well known folders within your user profile to a different location. These folders include Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures and Videos which can all be quite large. The folders are located under C:\Users\Yourname but you will find plenty of shortcuts in File Explorer which will allow you to get to them more quickly. The redirection process is very simple ... Click the Right mouse button on the folder and choose Properties, then click the tab that says Location. You will then see the properties pictured above. You can either type in your desired path which should be on another drive IE D:\Users\Mark\Desktop or you can click the Move button and use browse to navigate to your new location. When you are done just click the OK button. After doing this you will receive a very confusing pop-up box so please read the following carefully to understand what to select. The pop up box asks whether you want to move all the files from the old location to the new. In 99% of cases this is what you want to do as this will free up your disk space on the C: Drive so the answer is YES. If you click NO the new folder will still be created and used for all new data from now onwards but your existing data will remain where it is. You will not free up any space and you will now have your data split over two different locations thus making it hard to find in the future. It was the people who previously chose NO that lost their data during the recent Windows 10 upgrade. Microsoft were attempting to clean up unused folders and wrongly assumed anybody using this option would have moved their data. They therefore deleted the folders on the C: Drive without checking whether there was data in them or not.
You can simply repeat this process for all the folders you would like to redirect. I suspect there will be a few questions on this process so I will just answer the three most obvious ones here. Why can't I simply drag the documents folder to the D: Drive? You can but the problem is that you haven't told Windows 10 that you have done this. It will be okay for the majority of things but Windows will still expect to find your folder in the original location and therefore some processes will not work correctly. If I only have a C: Drive can I plug in a USB Stick or Removable Drive and locate the folders on there. YES you can do this but you will need to make sure this drive is available whenever you use your Computer. You have told Windows 10 where these folders are located and therefore it will expect to be able to find them. Why do I need 10% free space on my C: Drive? Your Computer uses this as a working area and as the space gradually diminishes the Computer is forced to work in a smaller and smaller area thus slowing it down. This area is also used for a huge 4 - 6 GB download once every 6 months when Windows 10 updates to the latest version. If there's not enough free space the update will be unable to download and complete. Once you have missed three updates (18 months later) you will be advised that your version of Windows 10 is no longer supported.
If you have already done the above and are still out of space on your C: Drive then Churchdown Computers can help you clear up some more space to get your Computer running at full speed again. Just call Mark on 07557 483438, e-mail mark@churchdowncomputers.co.uk or fill out the form at the bottom of theContact page.
