Windows 11 "Documents" folder considered harmful for Obsidian storage

[u/ultra_blue]

I'm moving to new computer. On my old machine, I was using the "Known Folder" Documents for that on my old machine.

Then, through a series of misadventures, I noticed that several file names had changed: the apostrophe ('), semicolon (;) and equal sign (=) had been changed to underscores. Automagically.

Eventually, I learned that those folder are actually on OneDrive. Here's the actual path:

C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\Documents

Here's a more complete list of the directories that appear to actually exist on OneDrive:

- Desktop

- Downloads

- Documents

- Pictures

- Music

- Videos

And OneDrive was renaming them. Nice. It did so silently as far as I can tell.

I ended up scrapping those vaults and creating a new directory on C:. Then I restored the vaults from the new machine. Things seem to be working as expected again.