That doesn’t work well for… well, most software I can think of.
Games: I do not want to backup the entire folder to ensure I have my save files. Modern games are huge. I want my saves to be located somewhere easy to get to (for the average user) and be quick to backup, without having to go in and cherry-pick specific files.
There was a good trend of using Documents/My Games, but sadly that seems to have fractured and now there’s also Saved Games, savegames, and some software has moved to using appdata% or just storing saves in the game install location. There’s no consistency, it’s a real pain in the hole.
DCC software (Blender, Photoshop, whatever): user preferences and config files. Again, I idon’t want to backup the entire software, as I’m likely to reinstall it from an official source when migraing/reinstalling to ensure I have the latest updates. However I do want to be able to backup my preferences or plugins easily.
Any software that allows users to customise it: let me backup those preferences without cloning the entire app.
I do wish there was a standardised folder struture for user data, but it’s 2023 and the chances of getting Windows/Max/Nix to agree upon and comform to a generic structure as sadly. The only thing I can think of that’s the same across platforms is the .ssh folder.
Yep. My main gripe is that due to various developers not catching up with new standards, a users files can be scattered all over the place.
I appreciate that - in theory - %appdata% should contain just a users files, but a number of apps also use it to store program data leading to a huge folder size. My own is >100GB, with some of the largest offenders being python and node dependencies that are not specific to myself, and could really be cached somewhere else.