Give a folder its very own drive letter

Windows Tip Give a folder its very own drive letter

Say you've got a folder you refer to all the time - like your My Documents or data folder - and you're sick of navigating a deep hierarchy to get to it. The CodeJacked weblog has a solution: assign a drive letter to the folder for quick and easy access.

Pretend that you have a file folder called C:\data\word_docs, that you use it constantly, and that you would like to refer to it with a shortcut of W:. Open up a command prompt window and issue the following command:
SUBST w: C:\data\word_docs
SUBST is short for substitute. (DOS commands are case-insensitive, so you could enter it as "subst" as well.) So, now, W:\intro.doc is the same thing as C:\data\word_docs\intro.doc -- two different ways to refer to the same file.
Neat, short way to access files in an oft-used folder. But, be warned: when a folder is mapped like this to a drive letter, file deletions bypass the Recycle Bin and are unrecoverable using usual methods.