Application Data Storage

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Revision as of 18:48, 17 December 2020 by Den4b (talk | contribs) (General introduction and the standard storage location in the user profile directory)
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Introduction

Applications often require a dedicated location for storing the application data, such user settings, profiles and documents.

The choice of the storage location can vary wildly between different purposes, applications and operating system, but generally speaking they follow one of the two common conventions.

  1. Portable versions – Portable applications usually do not require any system specific installation or uninstallation routines, instead, they come in a form or an archive which you can unpack anywhere you like. All (or almost all) application data is stored in the same directory as the application executable file. This makes the application folder self-contained and portable.
  2. Installer versions – The application executable is normally installed in a system protected location (e.g. "C:\Program Files"), while the application data is stored in a separate user-accessible location dedicated by the operating system, such as the user profile directory (e.g. "C:\Users\User").

Where is my data

If you are using the installer version, your application data should be stored in the user profile directory.

Type the following path into the address bar of File Explorer:

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\den4b\

There, you should see one or more sub-folders, one per installed application.

In a standard Windows installation, for a username "UserName" and an application name "AppName", the fully resolved path should look like this:

C:\Users\UserName\Documents\den4b\AppName\