Need a bit of help with custom user profile location

t0yz

Edit: For the others that may be interested, this is how I finally did this, and looks to do exactly what I want:

New-Item -Path "c:\Users\YOURUSERNAMEHERE\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data" -ItemType SymbolicLink -Value "g:\VivaldiProfile\User Data"

Of course you'd have to fill the new location for where you want it to be.

Hello,

I am using a custom user profile location on a separate HDD. I consume quite a bit of Youtube content, and basically almost all the writing on the SSD is from video streaming, so I though, why not put it to the HDD and extend the SSD's life. Yes, yes, I know, I'm probably paranoid, it's a decent 500GB 850 Evo SSD, it will probably outlast its 5 years warranty, but I still prefer it would die later rather than sooner.

So, I am using the "--user-data-dir=g:\VivaldiCache" argument in the Properties of the Vivaldi executable. All good.

Now, the problem.

When I open a link, let's say from an app such as Windows 10 Mail, or Twitter, it is sadly opened in a separate Vivaldi window that's using a clean, newly created profile, as I moved it from the SSD. That means it keeps recreating all the files in the Users on the SSD and that I would probably need to sign in there as well and sync my passwords etc.

I would rather have the links open in the existing Vivaldi window, that's using the custom User profile. Possible?

I assume if I could actually set the Cache/User in the Settings somewhere, and not use the argument for the executable, this would be solved. But I cannot find that option anywhere.

Any ideas? Thank you.

Edit: I potentially solved this by just moving the cache, instead of the whole profile, with the argument --disk-cache-dir=g:\VivaldiCache.

From Task Manager and HWinfo64, it looks like while watching Youtube, the data is written to the cache location/HDD, and not on the SSD, and clicking links in Mail opens in a new tab in the existing window.

If there's a better way of doing this, please let me know.

LonM

You could install Vivaldi as "standalone" on the drive that you want it to store its data on. Then make sure to set that particular one as the default browser.

t0yz

@LonM said in Need a bit of help with custom user profile location:

You could install Vivaldi as "standalone" on the drive that you want it to store its data on. Then make sure to set that particular one as the default browser.

Guess that's something to try next. I doubt it will impact the startup and load pages much if I use the HDD. The video streams barely do 1-7MB/s on the disk which is really low even for the slow HDDs.

The separate cache seems to work nicely for now with one exception, when the browser is closed and it starts because you clicked a link somewhere in another app. When this happens all the arguments in the Properties of the executable are ignored.

I remember (might be wrong, lots of time passed) that the old Presto Opera had option menus for changing its folders, including cache/profile.

Might be nice to have those back. It would fully solve this, as the browser would respect its Options, regardless of how it is launched. The argument solution is quite bad, can't understand why Chromium uses it.