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Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

Since I can hide it pretty well, I think this is great. It will make things more accessible to my mother, which means fewer 'tech support' calls.

Things they still don't seem to be addressing:

* Drive letters. It's 2011.

* Inability to make hard links to non-local storage. This infuriates me and makes it extremely difficult for me to manage my media in a clean way. On the Mac or Linux, for example, I can map my music folder to my Terastation. When I'm traveling, I can map my music folder to my external USB drive. Can't really do that for Windows, though.

There are countless other minor issues I have with Windows, and I see no sign that they're doing anything to improve on them. This is looking an awful lot like more superficial changes, which seems to be Microsoft's forte of late. Why do real work when you can rebrand, reorganize, change the website layout, etc. ?

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Regarding your second point: I'm not exactly sure about the details, but you could assign a drive letter to your music collection on your Terastation, and when you're traveling, you could reassign the drive letter to your music folder on your external HDD. This is not perfect, but could be a possible workaround.

For your second issue, couldn't use just use a symlink from the Music folder to the external drive?

Symbolic links can be used, but many apps that I use don't respect them. Hard links have the advantage of being indistinguishable from a real directory unless an app actually goes out of its way to inspect it.

No operating sytem that I know of supports hard links across device boundaries. Symbolic links are really the right solution there, and that many apps don't work with them is a shame.

> and that many apps don't work with them is a shame.

shouldn't a fopen work seamlessly with symlinks? Shouldn't it be dealt with at the filesystem level instead?

You're right, I misspoke. I have to revise my statements a bit.

On Windows, there are hard links, junction points (I believe they're the same, junction points are for directories), symbolic links, and shortcuts. Junction points only work for local NTFS drives. Shortcuts work on anything, pointing to anything, but they're just .lnk files and an app has to know how to process them.

Here's the kicker: you basically can't create a symbolic link in Windows unless you're running as Administrator! There's even an option to enable symlinking in the Local Security Policy, but it doesn't actually work (a known bug since, I believe, Win Vista)! The 'runas' command (basically, sudo) can't really be used, though perhaps it works if you create a 'real' Administrator account (by default, there isn't one that you can log into).

So, you can create a symbolic link to a file on a network file system, but not to a directory. And you'll have to run as Administrator to make it happen at all.

I'm sure that's more than you ever wanted to know about Windows and links. :-)

I tried hard to move my win7 user directories off C: on my home box - this requires the use of ntfs 'junction points', apparently.

I managed to get it working smoothly, with one glaring problem - I couldn't hide the junction point from the filesystem view. The junction point looked like any other file, and refused to be hidden (they're supposed to be), meaning that it was possible for them to be accidentally moved by an errant command - which would then lose the connection to the user dirs and screw up the system. So close and yet so far...

Can't you use Libraries ?

This is absolutely the Windows way of accomplishing it. With Libraries, you don't just "map" your Music folder to something, you can have as many folders as you want included in your music library.

How to Include a Network Drive or Folder in a Library in Windows 7: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4617-libraries-include-...

Can you use libraries so that the same media is sometimes available on a USB drive and sometimes available on a network server? i.e. an item may or may not be there, and it shouldn't appear duplicated.

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