How to change location of SkyDrive folder in Windows 8.1

We have seen that, with Windows 8.1, SkyDrive has been?deeply integrated with it. The SkyDrive team has been regularly adding features, as its receives its users? feedback. While the SkyDrive users have welcomed its integration with Windows,?one of their most common?complaints was that they could not change the location of the SkyDrive folder.

Now a days? we see many PCs with boot drive being a Sold State Drive (SSD) where space is a premium as these SSDs haven?t yet become as economical as regular Hard drives. By default files in the SkyDrive folder are stored at the C:\Users\<username>\SkyDrive.? And with SkyDrive data being stored there, it was a cause of concern because of lack of storage space. Earlier with SkyDrive desktop app, you had the option to configure where SkyDrive Synced its files, but with integration of SkyDrive in Windows 8.1, it became a concern, because of the absence. It thus became the most requested feature by SkyDrive users.

In Windows 8.1 Preview, users had been trying out various tweaks, registry hacks to achieve the same. But in Windows 8.1 RTM, you can do it easily. This post is a small tip about the same, though small but many of the Windows 8.1 users don?t know about this, kind of hidden yet useful feature.

You don?t get this feature from SkyDrive options in the new PC Settings. For this you have to open Windows Explorer in desktop.

Right click on SkyDrive in the navigation pane and select Properties and in that you have the ?Location? tab.

Here you can change the default path. You can change where the files in this folder are to be stored, to another location on the same hard drive, other drive or even another computer on the network. Just click on the Move.. button and select the new location of your choice and Apply. The contents in the SkyDrive folder will get stored in the specified location.

You also have the option to Restore Default back to its default path. Please note all the screenshots above are from Windows 8.1 RTM and the feature is available in Windows 8.1 RTM only.

This is a big space saver for those users having smaller SSD as their Boot drive. Apart from this shifting of location to save space on boot drive, there?s another unique space saver SkyDrive feature that doesn?t sync all your contents to your PC, unless you ask SkyDrive to do so. We have seen this feature in our earlier post. Though it looks like entire SkyDrive folder is downloaded, but actually its just the ?placeholder? of those files. It thus?consumes very little space compared with the actual files. You can just check this, by right-clicking on SkyDrive in Explorer in Desktop and check for General tab in Properties for the size.

As you can see, though the size is 137 MB, but size on disk is 9.2 MB, though all the files, folders are listed.

So try these nice SkyDrive features and as?a matter of precaution, do take backups before experimenting.

Source: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/change-location-of-skydrive-folder-windows-8-1?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=change-location-of-skydrive-folder-windows-8-1

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