Deleted the documents and settings folder, could I just recreate it?


S

SwitchS

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I was cleaning up files and I ended up deleting it in treesize thinking it was something else but it never went to my recycle bin so its just gone, I understand what it is now after looking it up and don't think I'll have any issues as I don't use older programs really. However I was curious if I could just recreate it and make it a junction link to users and it just not being system protected, would it function the same?
 

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@SwitchS

Might want to try this first...


Open a command prompt as Admin, and copy/paste the command below...

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
 

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As far as I remember, the Documents & Settings Folder is an old windows XP/7 thing.
You may have one if you are running really old software that creates the folder for it’s purpose.
It’s just a junction (link) to something in (or The) user folders.
 

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You can re-create it as you asked, but I can tell you I remove all of these legacy junctions and have been doing so since before Windows 10.

If ever ran across an application that needed one of those old folder names, that would tell me the app is old, poorly-written, or both and should be avoided.
 

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It is a junction to C:\users
You could use Junction in a Admin command prompt to re-create it.

<path to>junction64.exe "C:\Documents and Setting" "C:\users"

So if junction64 is on C:\ in command prompt you type:

C:\junction64.exe "C:\Documents and Setting" "C:\users"
 
Last edited:

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  • OS
    Windows 11 Pro
The Documents and Settings directory is just a Place Holder to be backward compatible with Windows XP and older versions of Windows you may be trying to access from an older drive. This place holder has no use in modern Windows since Vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11. It does not need to be recreated.
The folders that were previously under this directory (ie) Documents, Pictures, Music etc now are under their own setting at C:\Users\UserName\Documents, Pictures or whatever etc.
 

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