Comments on: How to change the default Google Desktop Data index folder

By: Prasad

Prasad — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:19:36 +0000

Hi there,

Thanks a lot for your information. I tried doing once and succeeded.

By: pan

pan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 03:07:37 +0000

just try this
creat a txt file:
————————————————–
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop]
“data_dir”=”F:\\Google desktop data”
————————————————-
save as “Google desktop.reg”
open it

By: Hayden

Hayden — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:53:16 +0000

To find the data_dir you need to make sure youre in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. (Very Important)
If you are accidentally looking under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE then you won’t be able to find it.

By: Lech (Poland)

Lech (Poland) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:32:08 +0000

Thank You very much for Your recipe. So simply solution is the most difficult to find

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:57:36 +0000

Thank you so much for this. My Index file was 9GB and since it was located in “My Documents” folder it was part of my roaming profile on our servers. Signing in and out of my computer took ages because it transfered the index to and from the server every time.

This fixed the issue so thanks alot!

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:33:24 +0000

Depends which version of Google you use. Google Desktop Enterprise stores its index under “C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop” which is a much more logical location.

However, if being used on a terminal server, this causes the C: drive to become full very quickly, if you have a lot of files on your network. Our user’s google index is currently 3GB each, as we have 400,000+ files.

I’d really like to find a way to redirect the index file path, for all users current & future, to a different drive. I could go through the registry and change each entry for “HKCU\Software\Google\Google Desktop\data_dir”, but this will take time, and not change for future users that might logon. I wish there was a common entry under “HKLM\Software\Google\Google Desktop” where you could set the default index location, that took precedence over all users!

By: mohammadreza

mohammadreza — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:29:13 +0000

thank yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooou!

By: Shenbagaraj

Shenbagaraj — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:39:33 +0000

Very Use full
Very good . . .

By: yurasuka

yurasuka — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:25:01 +0000

Hi Leendert

Nice and concise!

My index was so large that I decided to create an emty folder on the new drive, do the reg hack, delete the original folder totally and just reindex the whole lot.

Of course this (reindexing) takes ages but in my case I didn’t mind it as it’s on a computer that’s not used much (pretty much purely for trawling through years worth of docs and rubbish) and I had to get going so reindexing is better than me waiting for the huge move to complete and then have to start Desktop again.

Thanks for your post!

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:26:54 +0000

Worked like a charm. Thanks!