Ubuntu, just like any version of Windows comes with some predefined folders, like Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures or Videos that are all pointing to locations inside the Home folder. I just find so easy to use them, because it helps me be a bit more organized and because it comes with custom icons, it is really easy to differentiate them. But I had a slight issue with them, because my Home folder is on an SSD drive with limited storage, I cannot use them to actually store large downloads or videos in them, so here’s how I changed the path of those shortcuts to point to folders created on my 500GB HDD.
The path configurations of the users’ special folders are stored in a simple text file in the HOME/.config folder, more precisely in the user-dirs.dirs file.
In the first step fire up a Console. By default it should open in your user’s home folder, but you may run the cd ~ command just to make sure you’re in the right folder. Run the pwd command, this should yield /home/your_username.
Go into the .config folder by running cd .config
Open the user-dirs.dirs folder in your favorite text editor. Make sure you use the sudo otherwise the file is opened as read-only and you won’t be able to save it.
Each line corresponds to a folder. To change a folder’s location, just change it’s corresponding line. My 500GB HDD is mounted in /storage, on which I have created the Downloads and Videos folders. Then I’ve simply changed the path of those two to point to the corresponding folders inside /storage instead to the folders relative to my home directory:
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/storage/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="/storage/Videos"
I’ve only changed these two folders, I don’t really care about the others, as they take up minimal space compared to all my downloads and action/dashcam videos, but feel free to change any folder you want. You will need to do a restart before the changes take effect though.
I think a symlink is an other good solution.
Example:
Copy/move your folder to the new location:
mv $HOME/Downloads /media/mydata
Symlink the new folder to the old location:
ln -s /media/mydata/Downloads $HOME
That’s it. Works on every distribution on every folder/file without any extra configuration 😉
Have a nice day!
Hmmm… why didn’t I try symlinking them from the beginning? It isn’t more difficult than editing the configs, but it’s much more elegant… Thank you Andras for the tip!