Earlier this year, I came across the good fortune of being gifted a solid state drive. These drives are great, but come with one major caveat: Capacity. As my benefactor didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars, he got me a 64GB SSD. It's plenty to run Windows and a few key programs off of, but becomes rather inadequate when every piece of software tries to load itself off the C: drive.
That's where Symlink Creator comes in.
Symlink creator is a simple, portable utility which allows the creation of symbolic links, hard links, and directory junctions. I don't have the knowledge to tell you the difference between these things, but I can tell you that directory junctions seem to do the trick for me in all the cases I need. Somebody more knowledgeable than myself should tell me when I should use the other types.
When might one use this? Today, I found myself in need of this handy tool once again. A poorly-coded application insisted on downloading files to C:/Users/Ryan/Downloads, even though my downloads directory is actually at D:/Users/Ryan/Downloads. I didn't have room for its multi-gigabyte downloads on my small drive, so I used symlink creator to redirect the folder to my larger D: drive, as shown to the right.
Why would one use this instead of a shortcut? The beauty of the directory junction is that the file system sees the junction as part of the original file system. So, even though I'm saving on the D: drive, I can refer to it using C:\Users\Ryan\Downloads. The files end up in the right place automagically.
That's it for a quick spotlight on a handy tool!
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