Move Google Desktop Search data to another drive/folder
You may have partitioned your disks so as to keep all your OS related files on the C drive and applications as well as their data on another partition. Unfortunately, by default Google Desktop Search stores its data in the ”C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop” folder. If you look at the size of this folder (that contains the Google Desktop Search Indexes), you will notice that it eats up quite a chunk of disk space.
So you want to move the location that it stores data to another drive/partition, but there isn’t a setting to do so. You can get around this by following these instructions:
- Close any instances of Google Desktop Search that are currently running. (Make sure by checking the processes in your task manager and seeing that GoogleDesktop.exe is not one of the running processes.
- Copy the folder “Google Desktop” which is in your “C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\” folder to where you want the index files to be (Ex: D:\Google Indexes\)
- Start -> Run -> Regedit.exe
- Browse to the location “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop”.
- On the right side, you should see an entry for ”data_dir”
- Change the value held in “data_dir” (by double clicking on it) to your new location for the Google Desktop Search Files (Ex: D:\Google Indexes\Google Desktop\<subfolder within this>)
- Click ‘Ok’ to save the changes.
You should now be good to go. All you have to do is start up Google Desktop Search and it should now be saving indexes to the new location.
If all goes fine, go ahead and delete the files stored in your local settings (C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\) and free up some of that space.