After my small rant on the My Documents folder, a Coeur d’Alene reader wanted a little more clarification. They are in a networked environment and upgraded their computers to Windows XP. Now she has a new user document folder in addition to My Documents. She wanted to consolidate her business information, so it would be easier to see across the network and to back up.
In XP, the multi-user features are a little more obvious than they were in previous versions of Windows. Each user has a "My Documents" equivalent, i.e., Jane Smith’s Documents. This arrangement makes sense if you have a lot of different users on one machine (for example those who have a kid can set it up so that if the kid logs on, certain folders and software aren’t accessible). This is a good thing.
However, on a network, it can all get a little confusing. To consolidate, probably the easiest thing is to just create a new folder for the shared business documents and move everything out of the old My Documents and new Jane Smith’s Documents folders so they all are in one place. One way to organize it could be to organize the business files by type. For example, our Logical Expressions folder has subfolders for various marketing projects, our web site, and so on. As I mentioned before, you should do whatever makes sense to YOU. (Another thing that occurred to me later is that if you make the conscious effort to create a folder in the first place, you’re more likely to remember to put stuff in it.)
It’s much easier to back up files if all the data is on a particular drive or in a particular folder. One good way to use MyDocuments is to use it as a top level folder and organize your data in subfolders below it. Then you just back up the My Documents folder and everything underneath it.
In my case, I separate everything by creating a separate drive partition (D:) and putting my data there. Most new computers aren’t set up with multiple partitions these days however. Depending on the configuration, when I get a new computer I usually wipe everything off it and start over, so I can do "weird" stuff like create new drive partitions. However, if you don’t like My Documents or the user documents folder, you could just as easily create a top level folder called Data (or whatever you want) and create folders underneath. As I mentioned before, you don’t want to save your data files in with your software. It’s more difficult to back up and if your software changes, is removed, or becomes corrupted, you run into problems.