User Folder

rctneil · 14 Dec 2009 at 23:13

Hello,
I am in the process of reorganising and tidying up my currently cluttered users folder and all the files I ahve within Documents, Music, Pics and so on.

What I find, especially within Documents is that applications make their own directories in Documents.

Is there any way of having something to block them and let me know when an application is trying to write to any folders inside of the User folder and pop up a message so I can either accept or deny it?

Hudzy · 15 Dec 2009 at 01:02

It is well annoying.

Especially the 'Electrontic Arts' folder Dead Space put in there. That's not my typo

I just set them to hidden. Out of sight, out of mind.

rctneil · 16 Dec 2009 at 21:53

Any ideas?, I'd rather not just set them to hidden as my backup system will still back them up and the aim is to stop anything ebing created in there by any app and notify me then I can accept or deny it!

theheyes · 17 Dec 2009 at 00:11

I had a think about this yesterday and came to the conclusion it would be quite difficult, then I went and did something else and never posted a reply.

The problem is you grant the install process admin privileges for the duration which means it can do whatever it wants and at a high level you're really at the mercy of how configurable the installer is.

I've noticed on Windows 7 you get a UAC prompt when attempting to write to certain parts of the C: drive (I run as standard user) so I tried removing the administrator user from the permissions of the Documents folder - suffice to say it didn't work as I expected and wasn't prepared to meddle further with my own computer (you can really make a headache for yourself with file permissions, so if you try it back up first).

So the short answer is, to my knowledge, no there isn't an easy way of doing this. Not out of the box anyway. I'd be interested to hear if anyone had a solution though.

How configurable is the backup software? If it's just an issue of excluding these folders from the backup then it may be more productive to try and do this rather than change the way Windows behaves.

rctneil · 17 Dec 2009 at 11:22

ok, thanks for the help idea. I'll just have to live with it. I could exclude them from backups but it's too much faff. Thanks Again

bledd · 17 Dec 2009 at 11:32

it is gay

they should either use 'application data' folder or 'saved games'

Hudzy · 17 Dec 2009 at 15:10

I'm not sure why they don't really, that's what those folders are for after all.

IAmATeaf · 17 Dec 2009 at 15:27

Isn't the problem that if they used App Data then the average user wouldn't back this area this hence the loss of saved games if the users profile is reset.