Syncing additional folders with the new SkyDrive

I’ve been using Live Mesh for years but Microsoft is basically done with it and wants everyone to move over to SkyDrive.  Now, SkyDrive is great, better interface, more storage, online Office apps and more, but up until recently uploading your files was a manual process.  Now, with the latest update they’ve finally provided Mesh like syncing capabilities akin to DropBox.  The only missing feature is being able to add multiple folders to sync, everything has to be in that SkyDrive folder it’s creates (%userprofile%\SkyDrive, which was coincedently the same location of my Mesh folder).

But there is a work around by creating symbolic links and it’s very simple using the MKLINK command.

Right-click the “Command Prompt”, select “Run as Administator” and run the following command:

mklink /d drive:\path\newlinkname drive:\path\exisitingfolder

Here’s an example:

mklink /d "E:\Users\TestUser\SkyDrive\Photo Albums" E:\Photos

Skydrive then sees the symbolic link as a new folder and treats it as such, eliminating the need to reorganize your folder structure.

One side note though, if you are linking to your Documents folder and using Windows 7 (what I tested it on), you’ll need to enter the folder path with “My Documents” not just “Documents”.  Using only “Documents” caused SkyDrive to continually crash.