How to Move your Windows User Profile to another Drive | Core Dump
My user profile was getting very large – as in, really, really large. I was running out of space on my C: drive, and I had a 2nd hard drive onto which I could move things, but I didn’t want to move things piecemeal – I wanted the whole kit & kaboodle. I didn’t just want my documents, videos, music, and pictures moved – I also wanted my ISO images, virtual machine hard drives, and email archives moved – a lot of which lived in my “AppData” folder. I wanted to give my user profile room to “grow” – and I also wanted the performance benefit of having my user profile on a different physical hard drive from my OS drive.
The picture below shows what I ended up doing – I created an NTFS junction point for my user profile, and moved it onto a 2nd hard drive. The result: my OS drive, C:, is just my OS (and programs). The 2nd hard drive (labeled K:) is entirely my user profile. Obviously, it’s grown a bit since I moved it!
So what do you do if you’re in a similar situation and want to move your entire user profile to a different drive (or just a different location on the same disk)?
Enter NTFS directory junction points.
If you’ve ever used UNIX or Linux, you may be familiar with the concept – however, if you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s fairly simple to imagine (I’ve talked about it before as well). Basically, think of a junction as a file-system-level shortcut. Whereas “normal” Windows shortcuts only work in Windows (and are actually little files that redirect you when you click on them), a junction operates at a much “lower” level in the file system, silently redirecting access requests. (This Wikipedia article does a better job explaining what they are than I could ever do, if you’re curious.)