Another FlipShare Trick – Changing the Storage Location

This is another of those geeky posts. But since a couple of people found my entry on Updating FlipShare Software helpful, I am sharing this little solution because I haven’t been able to find this anywhere else on the web, and I am sure that it is a common problem…

The current European version of the FlipShare software will not allow you to change the default location where the video files are stored (I believe this is possible in the later US version, but I don’t seem to be able to download that). For me, this gives rise to two problems. Firstly, my c: drive is rather full – and videos take up lots of space, so I didn’t really want them there. Secondly, I try not to keep ANY data on my c: drive, since Windows periodically dies and needs re-installing, so I consider it good house-keeping to keep my data in a separate partition where it isn’t effected by the death of Windows so easily.

Here’s the solution – symbolic links! Windows Vista introduced this concept (which has been around in the Unix/Linux worlds for ever) – and very helpful it is too. Effectively you fool anything running higher than the operating system (i.e. programs!) that a directory exists in a certain location, when in fact they live elsewhere. (For more information on Symbolic Links follow this link).

Here’s a step by step guide.

  1. Locate your FlipVideo files. They should be in the c:usersyournamevideosflipshare datavideos
  2. Choose your new location for the files – for example d:flipvids
  3. Move all the video files from their original directory to the new one NB make sure you aren’t running the FlipShare software while you do this!
  4. Delete the original videos directory
  5. Your now going to need to get a bit geeky and do some things at the command prompt. You must make sure you use ‘Run as administrator’ when you run the command prompt – since you need admin privileges to carry out this trick.
  6. Change directory to your videos directory – by typing something like

    cd c:usersusernamevideos
  7. Now you need to check what the ‘short’ file name is for your flipshare directory. To do this, type

    dir /x


    This fifth column in will reveal the ‘short’ version of the ‘FlipShare Data’ directory. It will probably be something like ‘FLIPSH~1’.
  8. Now you’re going to create the symbolic link. Type the following:

    mklink /d c:usersusernamevideosflipsh~1videos d:flipvids


    (obviously use YOUR username, the correct short name for your ‘FlipShare Data’ directorym, and whatever location you have moved your video files to). It should then report ‘Symbolic link created for…’ followed by your directory information.
  9. That’s it! Once the link is created, you can browse your videos in explorer as you could before, or via the FlipShare software itself.

Hope that is of use to someone else out there. I was pleased finally to get this working how I wanted!

PS I have only tried this in Vista, but believe the same idea should work in Windows 7 too.

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