Moving users folder on Windows Vista to another partition - bad idea?

I am aware of two questions - one here and one on serverfault which ask HOW to do this. I even provided answers myself, having done it a few months back.

But now I'm having second thoughts.

My plan was to be able to backup and restore system and user data independently. But I obviously wasn't thinking straight at the time, because there is NOT a clear dividing line between system and user data. I realised this recently when I wanted to backup the partition with the /Users folder in. The process couldn't access ntuser.dat* files.

So if I suddenly lost my disk, restoring just the system partition wouldn't help at all.

Given the amount of time I invested in doing this, I think I'm just going to wait for the Windows 7 upgrade before I start over, but in the meantime: Is there any reason why this is NOT a bad idea?

Solution 1:

It's a perfectly good plan. However as you noted ntuser.dat is located in your user folder. This file is where all your registry settings are located, you can see it using regedit and then look at HKEYCURRENTUSER.

ntuser.dat will be held open as long as that user is logged in. This means that you cannot copy it as a regular file, you need to use a backup program that uses the shadow copy service to be able to backup that file as well. Alternativley you can run the backup logged in as another user.

I wouldn't call ntuser.dat a system file since your system is perfectly functioning even if you remove it, You will have trouble using that specific user account but that's all.

All in all, I don't see any real downsides from this setup.

Solution 2:

I think it is a bad idea.

I was pretty gung ho about the idea but after reviewing all the relevant questions I could find:

• Moving users folder on Windows Vista/Seven to another partition
• What’s the best way to move c:\users to d:\users under vista/W7 (ServerFault)
• How do I change the default location for a users home directory in Vista? (ServerFault)

And your blog post on the subject. I did a 180 and decided this is way too much of a process to be worth it. There is too many gotchas and things that could go wrong.

I'm just about to do a fresh install of Windows 7, while I like the idea of separating data from the OS in theory (I do it in Linux all the time) Microsoft really doesn't facilitate the ability to do so easily and securely under Windows. So my plan is to just run weekly Windows backups of my Users directory and restore from that if I need to do a new fresh install.

The whole separation process is easier when you are dealing with a computer that is used by one user, then you can use the alternate solution outlined by gadzooks64 without much trouble. It becomes harder to manage when you have multiple users on the same machine.

Also People running Windows 7 should note that Windows 7 has the concept of libraries, so it fairly easy to create a D:\Music directory on a separate partition and include it in your music library, without even having to move the Users\<username>\Music directory.