Just right-clicking My Documents and hit properties. From there you can relocate your My Documents folder. No need for registry hacking.

It’s good to relocate this folder, for the exact reasons Luke has said above.

@Travis – tl/dr version: the MAX_PATH in windows is 256 characters and it sucks! lol

@Starhawk – yes, you could relocate My Documents to a better place. I recommend a separate partition or a secondary drive for example which has added benefit of separating your data from your OS and application files. :)

Ya gotta love Windows. lol. I wonder how long we gonna continue to be cursed by the 2 to the eight thing anyway. That maybe made some kinda sense in the MS Dos days but is retarded in a modern OS.

The simplest solution would be to move the My Documents folder to a better location. It’s not too hard, see How to Change the Default Location of the My Documents Folder. I’ve never did it but it should work ok and btw the same method works for Win 2000 pro. I don’t think it works on Win 98 and stuff like that but I could be wrong. Doubt many ppl still use these OSes anyway. If they do I think a registry hack will do the trick.

My new thing with blogs is tl/dr versions are needed ;)

I suspect it makes no difference internally, since these system variables simply expand to appropriate paths – they are not symlinks or junctions.

You could possibly truncate the path by say creating a junction from:

C:\reports\

to

C:\Documents and Settings\Johnathan Smith\Work Files\Reports 07\

Then each year you can just re-junction the reports folder to another one. Or you could skip My Documents and just keep your files on the root drive. But again, not a perfect solution. :(

Instead of running long paths in Windows, is it possible to truncate it using %SYSTEMROOT% or %APPDATA%? Or does it make no difference?

@Matt` – depends on the file system but standard ones like ext2 and ext3 or Raiser-FS have no path size limit defined. Neither does FAT32 and FAT16 – so this path restriction is purely artificial NTFS quirk.

@Zack – that’s what I thought I read somewhere but I wasn’t sure. It’s nice to know they are adopting saner practices. I guess they had to update the user directory structure with the new security model in place and all. And the fact they ripped it off Mac is not surprise – they have been doing this since the very begging.

If you run strings on certain applications (like http://ftp.exe) and parts of the TCP/IP stack you will see BSD copyright license notes. Granted – this is perfectly legal under BSD license but it does show you that Windows is basically amalgamation of ideas and code that was developed elsewhere and then poorly ported to work with the rest of the OS. :)

Yes, Vista does do it differently. They use a slight different hierarchy. It’s setup as C:\Users\[Username]\Documents and C:\Users\[Username]\Pictures, etc etc. for all documents, music, pictures, favorites, desktop and whatnot. I believe it is almost the exact same layout as OSx if I am not mistaken. I remember commenting on it when I first got my Vista computer. Noting all the things that MS “tried” to copy out of OSx

Well that’s silly…

Is there a limit on path lengths under Linux? The problem is lessened by the pared back default folder names (seems like every important folder is a 3 letter contraction) but the monster-length file path you came up with is only 9 characters short of 256 if you take out everything up to and including “My Documents”.

Really should be handled automatically, so I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t already written up some code for Linux to do so.