My Documents - dumping ground?

"My Documents" - to me the definition of this would be "documents created by me", or in other words, the various files I create in applications such as Word, Excel, Visio, Power Point etc. As a laptop user, these are the files I carry around with me for my day to day work and synchronise back on to the server for backup (using peersync from Peersoftware as opposed to XP Offline Files, which cause way too much bother and will be the subject of another post).

However, it seems many software companies have taken the stance that this is actually a good dumping ground for any files which they might consider pertain to me, even loosely. So I edit some video in Premier Elements 2.0 and find a 130Mb work file down in My Documents. I have a couple of PDF Engines on my laptop, one which I purchased and one which arrived with some other software application (possibly Sage Accounts). OK, we'll just dump copies of various PDFs we create in your My Documents.

SQL Server Studio 2005 has its day down there with a pile of settings. I also have a raft of other "My" folders, just to somehow suggest to me that the data is mine. My Pictures, My Videos, My Received Files, My Skype Content, My Skype Pictures, My eBooks, My Music, My Maps.

So I'm working remotely and figure I've created some documents I'd like synchronised back to the server. It's only a few K, so doing a sync over VPN is fine. Except it ends up being a few Meg or a few hundred Meg because of all the apps that have been dumping in My Documents.

Then we get many of the various users we look after, with laptops, complaining about how long it takes to sync their My Documents folder. Well, that'll be the 500 digital photographs you took and the upload application, or the operating system stuck them all in My Pictures, right below My Documents. Hardly their fault - the software decides where it's all going, but they suffer for it.

Of course, the quick solution is just to bin all this "junk", but you've no idea what it might break, or what you might lose.

Much more amazing, is why these applications aren't writing to the Application Data or Local Settings folders. Plus, what hope do we have when the very people who designed all this stuff continue to break their own rules? They even break it the other way and stick these all important PST files (whether they be the main mail store, or merely archive files for Exchange) away down the hidden Local Settings directories. More likely than not, this is because they can't replicate them with the Windows Offline Files "technology", so it's a sort of "out of sight, out of mind" solution.

"My Documents" - nah - should be renamed to "My Dumping Ground, Everyone Welcome"...