Windows XP

[Segilla]

Reading in a Which? mag that My Documents has special advantages and that data therein is less likely to be lost in a crash, I transferred all my working document folders as sub folders of My Documents.

At the same time i did a computer clean up, and things do not always work a well as they did.

Have i misunderstood the My Docs situation so there is a need to put my folders back under C:?

TKS

[Lucy Thomas]

As a rule of thumb, the only files that should reside in My Documents are files that you've made yourself or other non-system files such as music or video downloaded from other sources such as the internet.

You should not put any system files in MD. Could it be possible that when you moved your files, you inadvertantly moved system files?

[Segilla]

Only folders I had created for things like [myname] Personal,
[myname] Projects and so on were moved as subfolders of My Docs.
I'll move them all back again.
TKS

[vehelpfulguy]

You say you are going to move them back, but to be honest you are better keeping them in My Documents and finding out why there is a problem.

One great advantage of keeping all your personal files in My Documents is that when you back them up (you do back them up I hope) then you just have to back up everything in My Documents instead of hunting all over your disk.

You say:

>and things do not always work a well as they did.

Can you explain what goes wrong?.

As Lucy says individual files like mp3, digital pictures or even individual word or excel files should not cause a problem if they are moved.

What MAY cause problems is if you have files that are dependent on each other.

So you have a folder caled Projects. Maybe you have a project management tool. Maybe it consists of a number of files that work together and maybe the program keeps a log of where these files are.

Moving THEM from one folder to another could cause problems because the log would no longer point to the correct folder location..

Can you let us know what problems you are having when you move the files ?

[rojash]

I agree with VHG. The My Documents folder (and sub folders) is the logical place to keep your documents (and other data). Moving stuff to there should not cause a problem, unless of course you had programs that were expecting to find their data in a particular location, and you moved the data without telling the programs!

As VHG says, it also makes it a lot simpler to backup your data.

Having said all that, I can't imagine why Which? magazine concludes that data in My Documents is less likely to be lost in a crash, unless they are also recommending that you regularly back up the My Documents folder. If that is not the case, the data stored there is just as vulnerable as any other data.

[Segilla]

Many thanks to all who wrote.

I did remove my Folders from being sub folders of My Documents, but the balance of advice seems to be to put them back again. The fact that one is called 'Projects' is not significant as I could easily have called it something else as it simply contains family history investigations.

Which? Computing mag.Jan 2007
"... safest place to store files is in Windows' default My Documents folder. This folder has special properties, So for example, if your computer crashes anything saved in the My Documents folder stays there even of you have to restore your computer".
I thought I'd been forsaken by my guru but he phoned about an hour ago and will look at my computer's ailments.


.

[rojash]

So in fact when you said "less likely to be lost in a crash", you meant "less likely to be removed in a recovery"...

[Segilla]

Yes Rojash. To this layman's mind, the effect would be the same.