Question DEFINITELY need your help - home directory "dissapeared" after trying to re-define location of "Pictures" directory

[rchamlen]

Ok Folks, I definitely need your insight on this. Per my other thread (symbolic links, ...... etc) current right here ..... I was attempting to re-define the location of my Pictures folder from a secondary data drive back to my home directory. Not quite sure what happened, but either I screwed up syntax, or windows got confused, but ..... what I ended up with is effectively my entire user directory, which should be at "c:\users\username" being now placed in a directory "c:\users\Pictures", and the aforementioned Pictures special directory now being located at "c:\users\Pictures\Pictures". And, somehow, the higher level "pictures" directory (c:\users\pictures) is actually designated as the special folder .... as when I right click on it it comes up with the option to change the location. all the data is there, and sure enough, when I check %userprofile% all of my usual home directory contents are now in the c:\users\pictures location.....

I suppose what I did wrong is that when I specified the change in location for the pictures location, I gave a path c:\users\username (assuming windows would create the sub folder "pictures" , when I guess I should have pre-created a folder with name and path c:\users\username\Pictures ????

How do I get out of this??????? One of the options when I right click on c:\users\pictures is "restore default". If I do this, will all get put back in place, or will things just get more hosed up. or ..... is there a more reliable/elegant way of re-establishing the correct paths.

I'm not really at risk of loss of data (backups/backups/backups), I just would really rather avoid having to re-build the whole user profile......

 

[USAFRet]

Right.

To redirect the Libs, you NEED to create the folder first.
This changed between Win 7 and *, and 8.1 and 10.

Previous (7 & 8), it would make those folders for you. You just had to identify the drive or partitions.
Win 8.1 and later, you NEEDED to create the new Lib first, an then point the function at this new folder.

The ONLY thing you can try right now is 'restore default'.

If that fails, I am unsure of a real fix, other than creating a NEW user account and then using that.

 

[rchamlen]

Right.

To redirect the Libs, you NEED to create the folder first.
This changed between Win 7 and *, and 8.1 and 10.

Previous (7 & 8), it would make those folders for you. You just had to identify the drive or partitions.
Win 8.1 and later, you NEEDED to create the new Lib first, an then point the function at this new folder.

The ONLY thing you can try right now is 'restore default'.

If that fails, I am unsure of a real fix, other than creating a NEW user account and then using that.

Right .... thanks ..... I figured it was something like that.

I always have backups. Right now am creating more. Eventually I guess I will try the restore defaults ..... be "interesting" to see what happens :-( . My guess is that once directories are interleaved like this, things will just get more hosed up, as Windows will likely not "remember" what should go where. I guess that is what I get for trying to do something fancy instead of just letting the windows defaults have their own way....


Worse comes to worse, I likely can get away with just deleting and re-building the user profile (pita). slight complication is that I am also doing disaster recovery backups for others from Dropbox and Onedrive. I "should" be able to be safe by disconnecting my local copies from the cloud before I do anything .... then re-downloading stuff when I am back in a safe condition.



But Murphy is always out there watching......

 

[rchamlen]

Right.

To redirect the Libs, you NEED to create the folder first.
This changed between Win 7 and *, and 8.1 and 10.

Previous (7 & 8), it would make those folders for you. You just had to identify the drive or partitions.
Win 8.1 and later, you NEEDED to create the new Lib first, an then point the function at this new folder.

The ONLY thing you can try right now is 'restore default'.

If that fails, I am unsure of a real fix, other than creating a NEW user account and then using that.

Yeah .... the restore defaults option does not work .... for precisely the reason you said ..... it wants to redirect to c:\users\username\Pictures, .... BUT the "username" directory does not exist. I do have a msft business account, I might try giving them a call .... but I am all set if I need to to delete the account and re-create it fresh.

Im somewhat surprised that windows even allows the redirect of the Pictures directory to overwrite the users home directory. Oh well.....

 

[USAFRet]

Don't bother calling MS.
There is no real fix for this, other than recovering from a Restore point, or other full drive backup you made before this happened.