Save hard drive space with Mklink

sprague — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:41:26 GMT

There’s no shortage of disk space in my house, but only a small amount really needs to be backed up. The music and photos -- yes of course you want that backed up, but why waste gigabytes on a database that can just be recreated later anyway.

I keep my most important stuff on a 50GB RAID 1 (mirroring) partition that I regularly back up using the Vista incremental backup feature. But lately that drive is getting too full, so I need to remove something. One thing that can go is my Picasa database of photos, since I have my photos on Live Photo Gallery already and this is just for playing around. But the software won’t apparently let me specify an alternate location for the database, which must always be on the main drive. So here’s what I did:

First I copied the multi-gigabyte Picasa database file (called ‘db3’) to another drive. Then I deleted it on the main drive. Then I did this:

mklink /d db3 “d:\spare\photos\db3”

Now Picasa still thinks the files are right where they always are, but when it tries to get them, the Vista file system redirects everything to the other directory. Nice!

I bet the same would work for another huge file on my drive: an IMAP email store that is already backed up in the sky and doesn’t need backing up. Outlook 2007 won’t let you change the location of an IMAP store, but maybe mklink would do the trick.

Richard Sprague WebLog : Tips

Save hard drive space with Mklink