Junction Link Magic



FOR EXPERIENCED USERS ONLY!
from: http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm

Junction Link Magic is a utility that lets you create junction points with Windows 2000, XP, or 2003. Junction Link Magic automatically lists existing junction points, and it offers you an easy interface to add, modify or remove junction points.
"A junction point (also known as a reparse point) is a technology for a folder to be grafted into another folder on the same local computer. Junction points are transparent to programs. This might not seem like a big deal, but it can remove a lot of clutter. It also helps a lot when moving programs from one place to another, since just about every program in the Windows world expects to never be moved from the directory it was installed in. E.g. moving your 'Program Files' directory contents to another drive, and linking the original 'Program Files' directory to this new location. With junction points you can also surpass the 26 drive letter limitation. Junction points can only be created on volumes formatted with NTFS 5.0 or higher. NTFS 5.0 is supported in Windows 2000, Windows XP and higher."

Mike Dinn discovered this after installing Picasa and being concerned about its massive database occupying even more space on his drive C:. Here is his story:

I've just stumbled over an interesting utility, which allows you to set up a link from an empty folder to where the actual folder (and sub folders) are. This came up in the context of Picasa using the C drive for its data files, and people wanting to relocate it. The use of "Junction Link Magic" to fix this problem is below. It would seem to be ideal for getting rid of data folders on C in general. You can move the folder - at least on XP using NTFS. Junction points let you have one folder point to another folder on a different drive. In my case I set up a pointer from C:\Documents and Settings\Bob\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2 to J:\MyDocuments\Databases\Picasa2 So far Picasa appears to be working well with the new location (in fact Picasa doesn't know there is a new location).

The process I used was:

I checked this with Picasa2 and it's working fine for me on XPPro. I think it should also work with Google DeskTop search but I haven't tested that yet.


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