Having several WoW installations without wasting space

As part of my multiboxing setup, I run my main instance at full graphics settings and the other four at the lowest settings. The easiest way to do this is to have two copies of WoW, the first one for your main instance and the second one for your other four instances. This wastes a lot of space though, because you have two copies of the Data directory, one in each WoW directory. I have a better solution.

In Linux, you can create links to files and folders. This means you could have a directory called "Alliance" with a bunch of documents with strategies on the best ways to gank lowbies, and you could create an alias called "Gankers" to point to the "Alliance" directory without copying all the files. Lucky for us, there's also a way to do this in Windows.

First, download the program Junction (don't worry, it's hosted in Microsoft TechNet) and extract it to your Windows directory. Next, create a new directory called World of Warcraft2 or something of your choosing. This will be the installation for your other four instances. Now, you need to copy everything in your original WoW folder EXCEPT the Data, Screenshots, Patches, and Logs directories into your new WoW directory. Delete the Accounts under WTF in your new WoW directory (because we're going to create a link for it also).

Now, open a command prompt (Start, Run, type in cmd). Go to your new WoW directory (for example, type cd "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft2"). Type junction Data "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Data" and then junction WTF\Accounts "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF\Accounts" and you're all set! Launch WoW from your original installation for your main instance and from the secondary installation for the other four instances. Configure the other four with the lowest graphics settings you can stand.

I hope this helps some other individuals who are storage-challenged like I am.

Indeed, there are some performance advantages to doing so, also. You might be interested in:

PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW

[Other] Windows XP .bat file to create symbolically linked copy of a wow directory

Wow, I guess I should have searched before posting redundant information. Sorry about that.

Not a problem, thanks for contributing. Just thought you might want to read some of the other stuff that we've figured out about linking dirs.

why not create a raid 0 with several hard drives. I did the dual hard drive action with my main's account on one hard drive and the alts on the other. Indeed it did speed up alittle but I then went for the big guns. I created a raid 0 and now OMG its fast. We are talking 4 hard drives working as a team to process data!

I actually did, orginally, have my 2 drives in raid0, but I wasn't really noticing much difference in performance (I think it's because they are pretty fast drives already - [WD raptor 10ks]), so I changed it back for easier reinstalls (no driver disk needed, and I can leave stuff on drive D:) as I reinstall a lot.

This is my second time trying raid0 on commodity m/b and not being impressed. I really think you need a dedicated, hardware raid controller to notice the difference if you've got pretty fast drives in the first place. Or at least that's been my experience.

Also, I tried splitting the wow dirs across drives and that actually slowed it down. My theory is that when it's all on one drive, and since it's a link, the disk caching can work for you when loading the Nth version of a given file. I noticed a significant loading/zoning performance boost when moving to one linked directory as I describe in the above link.

I am thinking of buying some solid state drives next and running some tests. Interesting reply you have there with your results :P