User profile location

izacks

This is a simple question.
Why does Vivaldi install for all users, create user profiles on "c:\Users\Windows-USER\appdata\local\Vivaldi..."?
On Windows, I think the Local folder is a temporary data storage location. Properly, I think it should be in the Roaming folder. Will this be fixed in the future? Will Vivaldi continue with this state?

LonM

@izacks In windows, "Local" means "Local to this machine" and "Roaming" means "Stuff in here can be shared across a windows network"

The temp directory is "Local\Temp"

Ayespy

@izacks AppData/Local is not a temporary data storage location. It is the standard Windows location for (permanent but modifiable) data and settings for all programs that is not being shared across networks. Chromium and Google Chrome locate user profiles in this folder by default, and so Vivaldi, owing to its use of the Chromium engine, also stores the user profile here.

izacks

Thanks for the reply.
I have been working on multiple Windows PCs manually accounts data and data migration recently. The main data of most applications is contained within \appdata\Roaming, and \appdata\Local has data that need not be backed up, such as cache files. An easy-to-understand example is Thunderbird.

But this is Chromium's specification Vivaldi traditionally follows it. I was able to understand. Thank you.

Kobi

As the others said AppData is user specific (so it's not installed for all users).

ProgramData that is for all users.

Those folders tend to be used for settings and cache tough (so I don't know why some developers use it, over the Program Files folder).

They probably trying it to make it exclusive to a user (since AppData is user specific).

Ayespy

@gwen-dragon And in either case, the profile will be in the user appdata directory. If installed for all users, then any other profile on the machine can open Vivaldi, at which moment a profile folder will be created in their user appdata directory.

LonM

If necessary, you can force the directory to change. Launch Vivaldi with the flag as follows to do that:

vivaldi.exe --user-data-dir=path\to\folder

burnout426

@izacks said in User profile location:

The main data of most applications is contained within \appdata\Roaming, and \appdata\Local has data that need not be backed up, such as cache files. An easy-to-understand example is Thunderbird.

Despite being based on Chromium, Opera works this way too. The profile folder for the user is in "AppData\Roaming\Opera Software\Opera Stable" for example and just the cache folder is located in "AppData\Local\Opera Software\Opera Stable" as cache doesn't need to be synced. Old Presto-based Opera (Opera 12 for example) works this way too. The built-in mail client part of Opera 12 differs from Thunderbird though as Opera Mail keeps all the mail files in the local profile folder so it doesn't get synced.

Point being, companies/programs differ on their choices in this area.

burnout426

@lonm said in User profile location:

If necessary, you can force the directory to change. Launch Vivaldi with the flag as follows to do that:
vivaldi.exe --user-data-dir=path\to\folder

Downside is, unless you modify the commands in the registry, if Vivaldi doesn't get launched with your modified shortcut that passes that to vivaldi.exe (like in the case of a file association action), Vivaldi will use the default location. You have to do something like this to work around that.