I will never rant enough about Windows. It is so aged. I have 6TB of storage, 2 SSD of 1To and 1 HDD of 6TB

But windows doesn’t care, it will pack everything in the same disk in this damned AppData no matter where you install your softwares, making main disk full.

Wanted to build a rather big docker image, but yeah, because I guess that the guys from Docker have other things to do than caring of a 90s OS with a fancy UI, they use an emulated ext4 file system, it filled my disk, Docker is crashing because of that, letting me no other choice than removing the emulated disk.

WTH are you doing building docker images in windows?

Grab a cheap Desktop/Laptop, install linux, and SSH in.

It is possible to move app data and the profiles but still done programs would assume the location. The mounting system Unix has is superior. Windows works best if it just sees one big disk.

Try junctions. They work (and will break your thing when target drive is missing). From top of my head, here is general idea: log in as another user, run cmd as admin, move your AppData (or sub-folder for AppData) somewhere else (on another drive), use `mklink /j`. Google on how the syntax works for it.

I would never use relative path, but IDK if that's real deal or just me thing.

NOTE: no idea if win11 supports it. I use it on w10 on few specific apps to store some bigger blobs on my HDD raid instead of ssd, so far stuff works.

EDIT 2: mind permissions (!)

EDIT:

About people saying that linux does it better...

I personally don't really agree. On windows you can get stuff spread across disks more easy than on linux - for example it's easy to install stuff on windows to other drives, but in linux package managers won't allow it, unless entire directory is mounted somewhere else, but this dosent give me "entire porgram X on first disk, entire program Y on another disk"

Appdata is usually used in with the environment variable %APPDATA% (and relatives) if you move the dir like @DubbaThony proposed. You can set the env variable to let applications write directly to that dir.
One othe much less known way: you can select one of your drives to be mounted under C:\Users
This way you only have to move files to the new dir and don't have to worry about applications that have problems with the default rights on the junction.
For explanation: if you install an language pack(any localised version after xp has it installed) it install junctions to replicate the behaviour of older systems. Some utilities have problems with junctions and microsoft disabled the filelisting of an junction of an directory.

@DubbaThony while i agree on the problem with linux package managers, it is still easier to have your data spread not only over several drives, but multiple, physically separated machines. I do that, and it works flawlessly across at least 3 devices for years now. Realistically you have one drive for your base System, and N other storage locations for every other type (or clusters) of data anyways (movies, games, images, samples, project files, footage, userdata, etc.)

Specifically some older windows software will behave erratically, when installed on another location than the C Drive, while linux doesn't care if it pulls data from a connected hard drive or through a laser connection from the moon.

@thebiochemic For your typical desktop expirience multi drives windows is still simpler. What you say sounds about right and about opposite to desktop enviroment, more like server enviroment.

@DubbaThony what?
You know that other devices doesn't necessarily mean, devices you set up. Dropbox, Google Cloud and all that stuff behaves the exact same on Linux as a regular directory/drive (as a mounting point) in contrast to windows, where you then need to tweak around and hope that the software doesn't explode if it suddenly needs to mess around with dropbox urls and stuff.

I literally have connected my Gaming PC to a NAS and have all my shit on there. No Server Magic there.

@thebiochemic Okay Im confusion.. Sure for cloud virtual drives, sure. For NAS though? I have been running games for like 2 years over NAS on windows. In linux I can't have packages install to different partition for example. I can't plug in thumb drive, and `yay foo-bar` to it. On windows I rarely install to C:\. RN on my windows machine I have 2 ssds, raid5 hdd array, raid 0 ssd array (that kills my pcie lanes...) and standalone hdd. And 4 NAS disks mounted. Entire setup never failed me and never gave me problems (except that darn 4 way raid0 ssd array, it uses 16 pcie lanes)

@DubbaThony i guess we had very different experiences then. Because i always had trouble finding VST Plugins for my Music Software when they were linked across drives or even samples across devices and stuff like that. However when i ran the same software on Linux, i didn't have these problems, and it just worked out of the box.

Old rant but resonated....

For nearly 2 decades (since i was 14 or 15; im 32 now) ive just written around the C drive = everything system... so it hasnt annoyed me (things that annoy me tend to lead to a hyperfocus period of rabbit-holing until0, most often, ive built a new system that doesnt annoy me).

How?
On any personal windows install i have a highly specific XML answer file that ends linking to a series of batch scripts (bash near the end for my wsl env)

Short ver:
Installs minus cortana and anything i dont explicitly allow.
Turns off auto updates, etc
Kill defender, onedrive, etc
Changes:
reg keys for custom scripts via aliasing
all my env... hotkeys, display prefs, A LOT of new vars, file ext. ,etc., lots of networking/symlinks w/custom keys-- algo only in my head.

Biggest change is the mapping of documents partition (DISKPART==my happy place) and most programs/data to a newly copied ver of my ext hdd par.

Yea, ima dinosaur, but i can use any system as mine in moments.