Digital Home Thoughts: Hey Developers, Get Your Hands Off My Documents Folder!

See that screenshot above? That's an incredible 10.1 GB worth of file bloat that I had no idea was there. The culprit? Cyberlink PowerDirector 9, a video editing application that I've been using quite a bit over the last month. I've developed a real love/hate relationship with this software; when it works, man, does it ever work well! It leverage's my Core i7 CPU and NVIDIA 460 GTX GPU in ways I've never seen any other app do...it's SHREDS HD video, both exporting and editing it. What's not so good is the stability and corrupt output problems I've been seeing. More on that later though; back on topic...

The issue at hand is that PowerDirector decided that my Documents folder was a good place for it to store "shadow files" of the HD files I was editing. They're some sort of proxy files for faster editing; I didn't realize this was happening, so when I was down to only 6 GB free on my Dell Vostro V13 with the 128 GB Imation SSD in it, I grabbed a copy of the awesome Treesize and went looking for things I could delete. I wasn't expecting to find 10.1 GB worth of video files that has absolutely no business being in the Documents folder. Worse, in looking at the preferences for PowerDirector 9, there's no way to override this to force the video files to go to a different folder or hard drive. That's simply awful development not to give the user a choice where these huge files go.

The Documents folder is for user data, not application data. Some things blur the lines such as downloadable content, saved games, etc. but in general if it's not data that the user has generated themselves in some manner, it shouldn't be in the Documents folder. With hard drives being as big as they are, I think developers have assumed that storage space is no longer a concern and they can put files whenever they want on the hard drive. There are a couple of problems with this faulty premise:

• Hard drives may be big, but SSDs are not - a 256 GB SSD is still around $500 USD, and 256 GB is less than half the storage you'd tend to get on a low-end PC nowadays.
• Tossing huge files into the Documents folder slows down backups, especially online ones. That 10.1 GB worth of video shadow files? That's backed up in Mozy [Affiliate] for me, which is of course ridiculous. I've long since deleted the source file and backed up the resulting end project - the intermediate shadow files are of no use to me.
• Synchronization between multiple PCs, something that's becoming more common every year, gets more complicated - and much slower - when files get put onto another PC that can't be used there.

If it seems like I'm picking on Cyberlink, I'm not - this is merely a symptom of a larger problem I've been watching since Windows Vista came out. Developers need to think hard about what they put into the Documents folder...at least until 256 GB SSDs are $100!