Live Writer Draft Folder

So I recently moved all my documents to SkyDrive – love it.  Can get to them from all machines, including Android, windows phone and Surface.  Then I rebuilt my machine and all my docs were right there… except for the hundreds of draft blogs that I never posted.  Now you can imagine the state of panic I was in, given that I am a frequent semi-annual blogger!

Live Writer, great and all as it is does not give you an option to specify your folder to store blog files.  It’s <user>\documents\My Web Logs and that’s it.

So a little bit of Bingaling and I found how to change this through the registry (thanks to Larry).

It’s a quick modification to the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer\PostsDirectory

By default this key does not exist, so you will need to create it.

1. Open up regedit

2.Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer

3. Right click on the “Writer” folder in the left pane and choose New > String Value

4. Name the value PostsDirectory and then double-click on it to edit

5. Enter your new location (<user>\SkyDrive\LiveWriter for example)

6. Save

 

Alternatively you can do it through PowerShell:

New-ItemProperty “HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer” -Name “PostsDirectory”  -value “C:\Users\<user>\SkyDrive\Live Writer”

 

Cheers