[SOLVED] A silly shortcut problem (using shortcuts to folders)

Software & Operating Systems Windows
1

Hey all,

I’ve got a way I’ve used for years, I have a shortcut to a cloud folder duplicated on all my machines. It works nicely, just means I click a shortcut called ‘current’ to go to most (would you believe) current projects. This has always worked for me, but my questions are:

  1. Is there a better way in Win10/7?
  2. I’m now running out of space on my primary drive, so I’ve off loaded my cloud folder to another HDD on the same machine. Problem will be of course, that the shortcut links will break as all shortcuts on all computers point to C:… and the new location will become D: or E:… If I had a secondary drive on all my machines it wouldn’t be a problem, but my laptop only has one HDD :frowning:

Any ideas bright people?

Thanks!

2

I’m not 100% since i haven’t done this in Windows but you could use Symlinks: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/12/02/symlinks-windows-10/

Just make a symlink for your new HDD to the old folder on the C: Drive. All your Shortcuts should then keep working.

Also, what kind of “Cloud Folder” is this? I get that it exists locally on all your devices. How do you sync them?

2 Likes
3

Thank you for that Dom, I’ll look into that. :+1:

The cloud stuff I’m using is Dropbox and Google Drive, if that helps?

4

Symlinks are the way to go. The jist of how it works is that it creates sort of a “hard” shortcut that works in directories.

So if you set it so that C:\cloud points to D:\cloud, then any file browser that tried to go to the one on C will just show the contents of the one on D.

This includes shortcuts, and can even be used for things like game saves for storing them on another drive or backing them up to a cloud service. It’s very useful.

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5

You will want to use a junction on windows. Normal hardlinks or softlinks won’t work to a directory on a different drive.

mklink /J C:\path\to\linkname D:\path\to\target

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6

Oh, I didn’t know that! Thanks for the clarification.

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7

Thank you @Ruffalo & @Phantom , Very much appreciated!