Few months back I bought a new high end laptop with i7 processor and 16GB of RAM. Decided to give a shot to “SSD hard disc” over conventional hard disc. Performance of my system is incredibly fast, I have SQL Server, Jenkins, Command line Dataloader jobs, Apex static code analyzer all running almost at same time. Windows OS boots up in almost 2-3 seconds only, as compared to 15-25 sec previously. However because of decision of “SSD Drive” I had to compromise storage capacity. My “C” drive is only around 150 GB however D drive has lot of space. After analyzing many folders, I found that google chrome browser creates its temporary folder in “C” drive even though I have installed it explicitly in “D” drive. I wanted to move “Appdata” folder of google chrome to “D” drive to make sure I have enough space in “c” drive.
I came across “Symbolic link” concept in operating System. In “Symbolic link” folder points to other location and its very useful technique to solve problem of storage. We can create symbolic link of many folder from “c” drive to any other location where we have good enough space.
So, I wanted to point Chrome folder of “C” drive to “D” folder. For chrome it would be still in “C” drive but physically all files will be stored somewhere else. Let’s see how I did it.
Open Command prompt, you may need to open it as administrator if you will face any error in next steps.
Make sure before running below command, “C:\Users\<Your_user_name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome” should not exist and destination folder in my case “D:\G2\ChromeAppData” should exist. You would like to take backup of existing folder, delete it and paste it to new location.
Below command is used to create symbolic link
mklink /d “C:\Users\Jitendra\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome” “D:\G2\ChromeAppData”
After running above command, your folders will look like :
This technique can be used at many places, I did same for Outlook folder as well.
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