Thursday, December 06, 2007

How to relocate your Groove 2007 files to another disk (when using Windows XP)

I actually had the same problem as the guy who wrote the original How to relocate your Groove 2007 files to another disk - my C-partition is only a couple of Gigabytes and most of my data resides on D-partition. Unfortunately Groove 2007 seems to keep it's user and system files on C-drive - so when you are using some big Groove workspaces, your C-drive simply gets swamped.

Luckily, there is a workaround in Vista called symbolic links where you basically redirect your folder to another location (this was the workaround from the original post).

Unfortunately I'm still running Windows XP so no full support for symbolic links. And then I stumbled onto something called junction points which are actually also directory symbolic links (already supported on Windows 2000 and higher.) You can create junction points using the linkd program which you can find in the Windows Resource Kit but there is also a program from Sysinternals called Junction so that you don't need to install the whole Windows Resource Kit.

So what are the steps that you will need to do (based on the original How to relocate your Groove 2007 files to another disk )

  1. Shutdown Groove
  2. Create a new folder on the disk you want the files to move to. I created a folder called GrooveData on my D: drive
  3. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Users\<username>\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Office\Groove  (well on my machine it actually used another folder - C:\Documents and Settings\[loginid]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\OFFICE\Groove )
  4. Select the ‘System’ and ‘User’ folder and move them to the directory on the other disk that you created in step 2.
  5. Use the junction tool to  map the folders.

junction "C:\Documents and Settings\[loginid]\Local Settings\Application Data\
Microsoft\OFFICE\Groove" d:\groovedata

I restarted Groove and everything seemed to work fine.

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