TechTreak

Are “My Documents” really yours? Are you really in control of them?

Windows 2000, and XP started using a common folder to store your music, movies, downloads and photos. The My Documents folder is a great way to manage all your personal data, and facilitates an easy back for all your data. Provided that you use My documents as your default save locations. This is unfortunately welcomed by many, and cursed by many more. How many times do you go through the motions of clicking the save option to have My Documents appear as the first in the list of choices? Or how about this – how many times do you import data, such as your entire digital camera archive, and the Windows scanner and camera wizard appears magically to automatically upload, and name the files, then save them in my documents\my pictures. As you can see, it’s a 50/50 task. Sometimes it works like a charm, and sometimes it’s a pain in the southern end.

The My Documents component of Windows is tricky, if you prefer to have family members share your my documents folder, you have to implicitly share it, by dragging the items into My Shared Folders. If you ever need access to your my docs folder and you haven’t shared it beforehand, you’ll not be able to get what you need, unless you log off and log on as the user that owns or has created that folder.

My documents is stored by default on your system drive, typically C: drive. If your system ever had a hard drive problem, or had to be reinstalled, you would lose this folder and all your precious data. Why not safeguard it? It’s pretty simple to do, provided you have a backup hard drive – preferably a D or E partition with enough space to hold your my Docs and all its sub folders. Windows 2000 and XP have a nice feature that allows you to actually change the location of the folder. Not only to change the location, but it also will relocate everything to the newly specified location as well. Much better than a manual copy and paste!

To change the default location of my documents;
- right click on my documents, and select properties.
- Open the Target tab, click the Move Button
- Select the new location of your my Documents folder. Click apply, and wait for the actions to complete. It may take a while if you have a lot of items stored there, but it’s worth it!