WAM: Move Programs From One Drive to Another

With the massive size of hard drives these days, I thought I'd never have to worry about running out of disk space. I was wrong. I recently purchased a laptop with two drives, a 128 GB SSD boot drive and a 512 GB data drive. SSD drives offer enhanced performance but, currently, at reduced capacities (at least at a reasonable price point). After a few installations of software that didn't ask me where I wanted to install, my C drive quickly began to fill up. It got so bad I had to move the pagefile off of the fast SSD drive because I was running out of space.

This got me thinking about a utility to move installed programs. Back in the 90s I remember a couple of programs that would do this including our own Change of Address which attempted to track down all references to a program in shortcuts, INI files, and the Registry and updated them with the new program location. This process can be very slow and it raises the potential for missing a value.

I wanted a simpler, quicker, and safer way to allow the user to move program files, so we came up with Windows Application Mover (WAM).

WAM allows you to move a program's folder from one drive to another by physically moving the files and then creating a junction point on the original drive pointing to the new location. All registry entries, shortcuts, INI files, etc, remain unchanged, they still point to the original location. The junction point in essence redirects those requests to the new folder location.

Note: Junction points are only supported with drives using NTFS.

Using WAM
After starting WAM, you'll see the Move Applications tab which contains all of the applications installed on a drive. You can switch drives by selecting the drive from the dropdown in the top right corner or selecting the drive from the pie chart at the bottom of the program.

WAM finds programs to move by searching the Uninstall section of the Registry. If for some reason you do not see the program that you'd like to move, you can select the program's folder from the Move Folders tab.

From the Move Applications tab you can move more than one application at a time. Select the checkbox next to each program you'd like to move and then hit the Move Applicationsbutton. A new dialog will appear showing each application to move along with source path, destination, and status. Status will most likely say "Path Missing!" You will need to either browse for a destination path or enter one into the input box.

With Preserve Path Hierarchy checked, you can simply enter the destination drive and the entire source directory structure will be created (if it doesn't exist) on the destination drive. For example, if you have Adobe AIR installed onC:\Program files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe AIR\, you can simply enter D:\ as the destination and with Preserve Path Hierarchy checked the destination path will appear asD:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe AIR\.

When the Status field updates to "Ready to move" you can click the Move button. This will start the process of moving the files from the original location to the new destination. When the move is complete it will then create the junction point which will appear as a folder on the original drive pointing to the new folder on the destination drive.

Undoing a Move
If you decide that you would like to undo a move, click theView History button. This will bring up a window displaying all of the moves performed by WAM. Select any of the moves from the list and hit Unmove to move the folder back to its original location and delete the junction point.

source pcmag