Things I've known about but never got around to using in my own file layout until recently are hard and symbolic (soft) links. You can create them from Powershell or CMD with New-Item or mklink, but a handy tool is Link Shell Extension that allows fast link creation within Explorer alone. The previous link has the whole explanation, but it boils down to right clicking a file/folder > Pick Link Source, then right clicking the destionation > Drop As... to your desired link type. I would start with non-essential or test files at first until you're comfortable with it, but it makes it easy to experiment with links to see how they can be used.
For now I mainly use symbolic and hard links to make non-portable programs portable (or portable-ish), but one use for Rainmeter is moving out the @Vault folder to an alternate/backup location while keeping the convenience of automatically adding new plugins to the vault when a skin is installed. If for some reason I need/want to have a clean install, I can delete everything, re-install, and then just replace the symbolic link. So either using Link Shell Extension above, or within a PS script like:
So that my Skins folder looks like the below. You could do the same for the entire Skins folder, but I just have a normal folder shortcut to copy or move configs to a backup folder.
For now I mainly use symbolic and hard links to make non-portable programs portable (or portable-ish), but one use for Rainmeter is moving out the @Vault folder to an alternate/backup location while keeping the convenience of automatically adding new plugins to the vault when a skin is installed. If for some reason I need/want to have a clean install, I can delete everything, re-install, and then just replace the symbolic link. So either using Link Shell Extension above, or within a PS script like:
Code:
# Standard disclaimer: manually back up files before running[string]$oldVaultDir = "C:\path\to\old\@Vault"[string]$newVaultDir = "C:\path\to\new\@Vault"Move-Item -Path $oldVaultDir -Destination $newVaultDir -ConfirmNew-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path $oldVaultDir -Target $newVaultDir -Confirm
Statistics: Posted by Alex88 — Today, 12:57 am — Replies 1 — Views 60