{"id":2237,"date":"2017-06-21T22:21:22","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T22:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/?p=2237"},"modified":"2018-09-06T23:20:51","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T23:20:51","slug":"junction-free-up-disk-space-using-symbolic-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/?p=2237","title":{"rendered":"Junction \u2013 Free up disk space using Symbolic links"},"content":{"rendered":"

I came across a brilliant solution that will blow your mind away and save all you System Admins out there having similar issue.<\/p>\n

The solution that I am referring to is an application called Junction. Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS junctions in Windows.<\/p>\n

Many of you must be aware that Microsoft introduced a concept of directory symbolic links from Windows Server 2000 onwards. What this basically means that you can have a folder kept somewhere else in another drive and create a junction point so that the computer OS thinks that it actually is placed in its original location.<\/p>\n

Let me explain this to you with an example.<\/p>\n

In our case, assume that the OS disk is completely full and you like to move the Windows\u00a0folder to the D drive of the system so that you can free up some space.<\/p>\n

First of all you will have to go ahead and download this application from here.<\/p>\n

Install the application on the local system.<\/p>\n

Since this is a virtual machine that I am showing the example on, I will be creating the link on the same drive. But the concept works on any drive that is connected to the machine,<\/p>\n

Now lets go ahead and create a new directory called Sym-Windows\u00a0in C drive.<\/p>\n

I will be doing this from Powershell.<\/p>\n

Navigate to D drive and create anew folder called Windows.<\/p>\n

New-Item 'Sym-Windows' -Type directory<\/code><\/p>\n

Note that we are using New-Item cmdlet and the type we want is a folder (directory)<\/p>\n

\"Junction
\nNow navigate to the folder where you had downloaded the application mentioned earlier. In my case it is\u00a0on the Desktop. Type the following command to create a symbolic link.<\/p>\n

\"Junction<\/p>\n

You can now move the content from the actual folder to the symbolic link that we just created and the OS will think it is accessing from the original location.<\/p>\n

A neat little trick, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

I hope this was informative and thank you for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came across a brilliant solution that will blow your mind away and save all you System Admins out there having similar issue. The solution that I am referring to is an application called Junction. Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS junctions in Windows. Many of you must be aware that Microsoft introduced a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4,6,48,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-tech-stuff","category-general-2003-stuff","category-general-2008","category-microsoft-windows-server-2012","category-server-2016-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2238,"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions\/2238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsoftgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}