One of the most important Windows folders is the Appdata folder, hidden by default, which you need to know. AppData is the system folder where the data and settings of almost all the programs installed on Windows are saved .
This folder is created for each user account registered on the PC and allows Windows to store multiple sets of settings if the computer is used by multiple people.
The AppData folder was introduced in Windows Vista and is still in use on Windows 10, 8 and 7.
To find AppData within each user account, you must first open the path of the user folder.
If the account name is Pomhey, then the user folder will be C: \ Users \ Pomhey \ AppData by default.
To see Appdata you need to activate the display of hidden folders in Windows.
You can also open the Appdata folder on Windows from the Start menu, using the search bar or the Run box, typing % APPDATA% and pressing Enter.
Before talking about Appdata, let's take a small step back to explain where programs save their data within Windows.
The installed and executed programs, in fact, store data in different places of Windows depending on how the developers have coded them:
- The registry contains settings and program options.
- The Program Files folder which contains the installation files.
- The AppData folder.
- The document folder, especially PC games.
- The ProgramData folder, which we talk about at the end of the article.
Inside AppData there are three other folders (in every Windows PC it is the same).
They are Local, LocalLow and Roaming which contain several files within them.
The Roaming folder contains data following the computer-to-computer user account if the PC is connected to a domain with a roaming profile.
For example, Firefox stores its user profiles here, allowing favorites and other browsing data to follow the user from PC to PC.
The Local folder contains data specific to a single computer, which is never synchronized with other computers even if you log on to a domain.
In Local there may be specific data for your PC or very large files, including cache files or settings that are not expected to be common on multiple computers.
For most home PCs that are not connected to a domain, there is no big difference between the Roaming and Local folders, because everything is still stored on the PC and the files are distributed in one or another folder depending on of the choice of the respective developers.
The LocalLow folder is like the Local folder, only that it is for programs that run with more limited security settings.
For example, Internet Explorer uses only data inside Locallow when it is run in private mode.
If a program is designed to have a single set of settings with files used by all PC users, then it can use the ProgramData folder.
This is also a hidden folder located in a different location, i.e. in C: \ ProgramData
In Windows XP, there was no C: \ ProgramData folder, but there was a " C: \ Documents and Settings \ All Users \ Application Data " folder.
Starting with Windows Vista, the data folder of programs that apply to everyone has been moved to C: \ ProgramData.
In ProgramData, for example, the antivirus configuration files can be kept, which are shared with all users of the PC.
However, these guidelines are not always respected.
For example, Google Chrome stores all settings and user data in the Local folder and never in Roaming.
Some applications may store settings in the main user account folder C: \ Users \ name \ or in the documents folder in C: \ Users \ Name \ Documents .
Others can only store data in the registry or in a different and unique folder.
The AppData and ProgramData folders are hidden because for most users it doesn't matter to know that they exist.
However, who wants to know where the program settings are, who wants to save them in a backup or who wants to delete, for example, the Chrome cache manually, then it can have to do with AppData very often.
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