Store User Data Under the User's Profile Folder

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Recommendation   (Designed for Microsoft® Windows® Logo)

By default, user data should be stored in the user profile. On Windows NT, this means that applications should use the following folders to store user document files and large user profile data, respectively:

%SystemRoot%\Profiles\username\Personal
%SystemRoot%\Profiles\username\Application Data

Paths to these folders should be obtained by calling SHGetSpecialFolderLocation with the CSIDL_PERSONAL and CSIDL_APPDATA constants, respectively.

On Windows 95 and Windows 98, applications should explicitly create equivalent folders to use for this purpose:

...\windows\Profiles\username\Personal
...\windows\Profiles\username\Application Data

Remarks

• In Windows NT 5.0 and later, the Personal folder has been renamed to My Documents. You should still access it by calling SHGetSpecialFolderLocation with the CSIDL_PERSONAL constant.
• If you do have user profile data that is more appropriate for the Application Data folder than for the registry, you should use the same hierarchical structure under the Application Data folder as that which exists in HKEY_CURRENT_USER:

  Application Data\
    Software\
      [company name]\
        [product name]\
          [version]\
            [your top level]\