All of our development machines have multiple drives mapped to specific functionality:

    C: System
    D: Data (business data and main work area for product design data)
    F: Library (stuff you rarely touch, PDF's, books, references, "knowledgebase", etc.)
    G: Backup (external)
    S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed)
    Z: Development (mostly for web development, VM storage, etc.)

The idea is that the C drive can be taken out and shredded and the most valuable part of the computer, the data, is unharmed. Decades ago I learned --the hard way-- that storing your data on the same drive as the OS/system files is a dangerous thing.

The other thing this facilitates is backup. You can backup and restore each of the logical/functional units separately, as full drives.

This also makes upgrading the system or the entire computer far simpler. The separation between OS and data makes it so.

Way back when, before the registry was a thing, you could upgrade your OS without having to reinstall the applications. While I understand the advantages of common DLL's and the centralized management of common settings and code, I do miss the ability to not only separate data from the OS, but also applications. I don't think that is ever coming back.

> S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed

Isn't it better to just have the RAM as RAM than to have the same RAM used to provide swap space on a RAM disk?

Thats what made me smile to :) Swap trying to swap RAM to RAM then suddemly: swap recursion :)

Sure, yet, it depends on what you are doing.

One of the primary motivations for using a RAM disk was to not beat-up SSD's with the kind of access swap space gets.

The advantage of a hardware RAM-based drive is that it is extremely fast. When these machines were built, this was the fastest way to get data on and off a swap drive.

Today SSD's are super fast. On some machines we now have a separate dedicated 250 GB SSD for swap. If it craps out, you throw it away and pop in a new one. No worries about comingling valuable data with swap space.

This^.

I still have my muscle memory tuned to creating and using only:

  C:\Games
  C:\Music
  C:\Movies
  C:\Pictures
  C:\Torrents
  C:\Workspace

I hate the default

  C:\Users\ChuckNorris89\Pictures\ or whatever.

Much prefer the linux ~/Pictures instead.

Or maybe this just shows how old I am.

Well ~ is basically just a shortcut to /users/ChuckNorris89. It's kind of surprising MS hasn't mapped ~ to go to basically the Windows home folder. In R on Windows you can use ~ to go there at least which is nice.

FWIW ~ works in PowerShell too.

  %CSIDL_MYPICTURES%
  %USERPROFILE%\Pictures

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/usmt/usm...

You can also add your own environment variables.

  setx pix "%SYSTEMROOT%\Pictures"

It works great but you won't escape the merriad of system folders in Documents or Pictures that way. Apps, games and the OS itself flooding these folders is the main problem why file management on Windows sucks.

That even happens on Linux. Apps dump a thousand little files in ~.

Distros and package managers putting binaries in completely different spots. Is it /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin? Who knows!

> /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin? Who knows!

If anyone is curious:

Historically /bin and /sbin contained the binaries that were necessary to bring up the system (especially to mount the /usr partition, which was "best practice" to have separately from the root and /boot partitions). Nowadays most distros just symlink them to /usr/(s)bin

/usr/sbin is for utilites that only root should use, whereas /usr/bin is for regular applications managed by your system (i.e.: your distro's default package manager).

I prefer the short paths myself. I create something similar and add it to the quick access in explorer.

>Avoid the "My Computer" paradigm.

My Computer paradigm is long gone. They call it "This Computer" or just "Computer" now. There is no "My".

I believe that started around Vista/7 and is a very telling sign of whose computer they really think it is now.

I understand this is (probably) a tongue-in-cheek comment, but the "My" prefix was infantile and terrible for scanning the alphabetically ordered list of folders ("My Documents", "My Music", "My Whatever"), so dropping this nonsense feels like a step in the right direction.

It still baffles me though how the Windows designers assumed it would be a great idea to bless me with a predefined "3D Objects" folder (right under "This PC"), which comes at the top of the list due to alphabetical ordering, and can't be removed. I wonder what percentage of users actually need this.

IIRC they introduced that one around 2012, when 3D printing was taking off and was thought to be the next big thing