How to rename user folder windows 10

How to Rename User Profile Folder in Windows 10

Windows 10 stores all user preferences and settings in a user profile. The user profile is a folder located in C:\Users\. It includes all account settings like the selected desktop background, screen saver, File Explorer options and many others. If you need to rename this folder after creating the user profile, here is how it can be done.

To rename your user account folder under C:\Users, you need to find your user account’s security identifier (SID). There is a special console command which you can use to obtain information about user accounts in Windows 10. It will allow you to find the SID, and plenty of other information. It is covered in detail in this article:

In short, run the following command:

Here is the sample output:

Note the SID value for your account.

You cannot rename the current user profile which you are signed in with. You need to use another user account with administrative privileges. If you don’t have another administrative account, you have to create one before proceeding. Then, sign out from the user account whose profile folder you need to rename and sign-in with the other administrative account.

To rename the user profile folder in Windows 10, do the following.

This trick should work for all previous versions of Microsoft Windows.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube. View all posts by Sergey Tkachenko

27 thoughts on “How to Rename User Profile Folder in Windows 10”

This is amazing! I have the worst profile folder name because when I installed windows and use my outlook account, Windows decided the first 5 letters of my first name was enough for the folder name. :/

Now I can finally change it to what I want! I thought it was impossible. Thanks!

Is it possible that WinAero Tweaker could ask for the new name and warn the user that everything will be shutdown and rebooted, then with the user’s approval set up the rename to run at next boot, update the registry, and reboot immediately? That would be cool.

Thank you very much for this guide, I was in the same situation as Sojiro84 after doing a clean install of Windows.

It worked! Spectacular…. Thanks a lot. You just saved me a lot of stress.

I tried this but Win 10 wouldn’t let me rename the user folder.

I’m guessing this might be because I moved some Libraries to D: (e.g. `Documents`, `Downloads`, `Music`, `Pictures`, `Videos` and `Contacts`.

Symlink it. Open cmd and type mklink /?

I was able to rename the user folder, but whenever I open the newly named folder, I get a “Location is unavailable” error. My PC seems to be searching for the old folder name. This error doesn’t prevent me from accessing my files, but it’s annoying to get this error message every time I open my Documents folder.

At the folder-rename stage I got a message that the folder couldn’t renamed because it was in use (“close the application and try again”). Restarted and signed in as the temporary local account, and all was well.

Thank you! I was stuck at this point for awhile trying to figure it out!

It worked for Windows but other apps stopped working. My Dropbox is still looking for old user name. Help!

Awesome! Microsoft’s “official” experts say that it can’t be done, but your article is quite efficient. The only trouble I had was that even though I logged out of my target profile, it still said that the folder couldn’t be renamed because the folder or files in it were open in another program. A restart and direct login to an admin account resolved it.

Effective solutions such as this one makes me think that Microsoft’s community support team members are just a bunch of flunkies who only know how to post unrelated canned responses… (maybe it’s actually their “AI” that’s posting the unhelpful, irritating comments? (In Microsoft’s case, “AI” = “Artificial Ignorance”, or “Artificial Idiot”…)

Can you implement a feature to Winaero Tweaker which is renaming a user folder in Windows 10

РЕМОНТКА

Вопрос о том, каким образом можно переименовать папку пользователя Windows 10 (имеется в виду папка, обычно соответствующая вашему имени пользователю, находящаяся в C:Users (которая в проводнике отображается C:Пользователи, но фактический путь к папке именно тот, что был указан) задается достаточно часто. В этой инструкции показаны способы сделать это и изменить имя папки пользователя на желаемое. Если что-то окажется не понятным, ниже имеется видео где показаны все шаги по переименованию.

Для чего это может быть нужно? Тут встречаются разные ситуации: одна из распространенных — при наличии в имени папки кириллических символов, некоторые программы, размещающие необходимые для работы компоненты в этой папке, могут работать неправильно; вторая по частоте причина — просто не нравится текущее имя (к тому же, при использовании учетной записи Microsoft, оно сокращается и не всегда удобным образом).

Переименование папки пользователя в Windows 10 Pro и Enterprise

Описываемый способ при проверке успешно сработал как для локальной учетной записи Windows 10, так и для аккаунта Microsoft. Первый шаг — добавить новую учетную запись администратора (не ту, для которой будет меняться имя папки) в систему.

Проще всего для наших целей сделать это, не создавая новую учетку, а включив встроенную скрытую учетную запись.

Для этого запустите командную строку от имени Администратора (через контекстное меню, вызываемое правым кликом по Пуску) и введите команду net user Администратор /active:yes и нажмите Enter (в случае, если у вас не русскоязычная Windows 10 или она была русифицирована путем установки языкового пакета, введите имя учетной записи на латинице — Administrator).

Следующий шаг — выйти из системы (в меню Пуск нажмите по имени пользователя — выйти), а потом на экране блокировки выбрать новую учетную запись Администратор и войти под ней (если она не появилась для выбора, перезагрузите компьютер). При первом входе некоторое время займет подготовка системы.

Зайдя в учетную запись, по порядку выполните следующие действия:

Закройте редактор реестра, выйдите из учетной записи Администратор и зайдите в свою обычную учетную запись — переименованная папка пользователя должна работать без сбоев. Для того чтобы выключить ранее активированную учетную запись администратора, выполните команду net user Администратор /active:no в командной строке.

Как изменить имя папки пользователя в Windows 10 Домашняя

Описанный выше метод не подойдет для домашней версии Windows 10, однако и тут есть способ переименовать папку пользователя. Правда я не очень его рекомендую.

Примечание: данный способ был протестирован на полностью чистой системе. В некоторых случаях, после его использования могут возникнуть проблемы с работой программ, установленных пользователем.

Итак, для переименования папки пользователя в Windows 10 домашняя выполните следующие шаги:

По окончании всех этих шагов — выйдите из используемой учетной записи и перейдите в ту учетную запись пользователя, для которой менялось имя папки. Все должно работать без сбоев (но в данном случае могут быть и исключения).

Видео — как переименовать папку пользователя

И в завершение, как обещал, видео инструкция, в которой показаны все шаги по изменению имени папки вашего пользователя в Windows 10.

How to Rename User Profile Folder in Windows 10/11

This article explains in detail how to change the name of your user profile folder in Windows.

In some cases, it’s necessary to manually rename the user profile folder because Windows truncates the user profile folder name to a certain number of characters when creating the user account. For instance, when you create a user account connected to a Microsoft account in Windows 10, the first 5 characters of your live account ID will be used for your user profile folder name. For instance, if sramesh_2001[@outlook.com] is your Microsoft account ID, the user profile folder would be named “ srame “.

This issue doesn’t occur if you create a local user account first and then switch to Microsoft account. If you’d like to have a custom name for your user account folder, create a local account with your preferred name. Once you log in and your profile is initialized, you may switch to Microsoft Account (MSA). The user account folder will retain the same name.

Likewise, on some systems, the user profile folder may have the full name with space in between (“ Users\John Smith ” instead of “ Users\JohnSmith “), and may you want to remove the space. If you have an existing user account with the profile folder name truncated to five characters or it contains a space, this article tells you how to rename the user profile folder as desired.

Before proceeding, it’s advisable to take a complete image of your Operating System drive, as a safety precaution.

Note: Until you complete the entire procedure till Step 6, do not log in to the primary account (whose profile folder you want to rename). Except “Step 1”, every operation has to be carried out from a secondary admin account only. If you’ve configured Windows to automatically log in to your primary account, disable auto-login before proceeding.

Rename User Profile Folder in Windows 10/11

To rename your user profile folder in Windows, follow these steps:

Step 1: Stop OneDrive Sync/Backup of your Personal Folders

If you’re using OneDrive, open OneDrive Settings and click the Manage Backup button. Turn off backup/synchronization of your personal folders, namely: Desktop, Documents, and Pictures. For more information, check out this article.

After you complete all the steps in this article, you can re-enable OneDrive backup if you want.

Similarly, if you’re using any other sync client (e.g., Google Drive, DropBox, etc.), turn off the synchronization of your shell folders in the respective app. You can turn on sync later.

Step 2: Rename the User Profile Folder

Alternately, you can find the SID of the user account (which is currently logged in) by running the command “ whoami /user “. So, to get the SID of the primary user account (whose profile folder you want to rename), run the whoami command from that user account.

This renames your user profile folder.

Step 3: Reset and Rebuild Windows Search Index

Full instructions are available in the article Reset and Rebuild Search Index Completely in Windows. Especially see section How to Manually Reset Windows Search and Rebuild the Index in that article.

Resetting search will clear all indexed locations, and Windows Search starts rebuilding the index automatically. If you have any custom folder locations to add to the index, add it manually by launching Control Panel → Indexing Options.

Step 4: Update the Registry Paths (system-wide)

Although you’ll be able to log in to the profile and use it, just renaming the ProfileImagePath value is not enough. There could be hundreds of registry values pointing to the old user profile folder, and the numbers can vary depending upon the programs installed on the system.

For example, the Cortana search stores the index database location in the registry, and failing to update the path breaks the search feature in the Start menu and the Settings app.

You can do a registry search using software like Nirsoft’s RegScanner or Registry Finder, and you’ll be surprised to see the number of registry locations (not including the trivial most-recent-used history locations) you have to update.

You need a decent registry search and replace tool to bulk find and replace every occurrence of the string “ Users\oldname ” to “ Users\newname “.

You may try the freeware Registry Finder by Sergey Filippov to find and replace the registry values en masse. Register Finder can replace REG_BINARY and REG_MULTI_SZ values as well. For support, visit the Registry Finder forum.

Note: Office 365 and other apps store the path in the above format (double backslashes.) in some areas of the registry.

Step 5: Update the per-user Registry Paths (NTUSER.DAT & USRCLASS.DAT)

The NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT are per-user registry hives that are separate for each user account. In the previous section, as you were using Registry Finder from the 2nd administrator account, NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT of the original account are not updated.

So, you’ll have to load the NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT file of the original user account in Registry Finder, find and replace the user profile path accordingly.

Log in to your primary account and see if everything works correctly.

Step 6: Update the INI files

Update the text-based files to reflect the new path.

Caveats

Information in this article applies to all versions of Windows, including Windows 11.

How to Rename User Profile Folder in Windows 10

Windows automatically creates a dedicated home/profile folder for every user account you create. By default, the name of the user profile folder is the same as the username. Since the home folder contains all the user-specific folders like pictures, documents, downloads, etc., Windows won’t allow you to easily change the folder name as you wish. If you ever want to, here’s follow the below steps to rename user profile folder in Windows 10.

Basically, there are four major things you need to do. That is, create a local administrator account, rename the user account, rename the user profile folder, and finally, map the renamed folder to the user account using the registry editor.

Just follow the below steps as is and the folder will be renamed in just a couple of minutes.

Caution: Before proceeding, create a system restore point. This helps you restore Windows if you mess up anything.

Steps to Rename User Profile Folder

Though the process of renaming the home folder is pretty simple, there are quite a few steps. So, to make things easier for you, I’ve divided the steps into four major sections.

1.1 Create a New Local Administrator Account

While you are logged into your user account, you cannot rename your own user profile folder. This is true even if you are the administrator. As such, we need to create another local administrator account. Once created, we will use that account to make all the necessary changes. Of course, you can enable hidden administrator account too but the below method is recommended.

Note: If you already have another local user account with administrator privileges then you can skip this section.

1.2 Rename Old User Account

1.3 Rename Windows Home Folder

1.4 Map the Renamed Folder via Registry Editor

Just to test if everything is OK, I’ve downloaded a single file from the internet. Since everything worked great, the downloaded file is saved in the Downloads folder of the renamed home folder.

Once everything is working fine, you can delete Windows user account you created earlier.

That is all. It is that simple to rename user profile folder in Windows.

How to rename a user data folder in Windows 10

During the Windows installation process, many users do not think about how important it is to choose the right username. It is the name you will see when you log in to the operating system and one of the root words on the way to any installed program. The name of the user’s folder depends on the name of the account. In this article, we will look into how you can rename a user folder in Windows 10.

Content:

Often, when installing Windows, the user is assigned a common name – like “User” or any other. After all, the system may not have been installed by you. But in the process of use, a standard or any different username may annoy or dislike the user. Simple renaming a user folder on C:\Users will not lead to anything. It doesn’t work like that. However, there are also no functions in the system to change the name of the user folder. So what to do in this situation?

Method 1: Creating a new account with the required name and changing its type

When using an utterly new account, the deleting of which will not entail any negative consequences, one of the options for solving the task will be to create a new user profile with the necessary name and access level. After logging into a new account, you can get rid of the old one by merely deleting it.

Important: After performing this operation, all content in the user’s folder will be deleted.

To start with, you need to create a new account with the desired username. To do this, you should:

Step 1: Right-click on “Start” button and select “Control Panel”

Step 2: While in the Control Panel, choose the “Large Icons” display mode and select “User Accounts”

Step 3: In the window that appears, click on “Manage another account”

Step 4: To add a new user click on the link “Add a new user in PC settings”

Step 5: The system will move us to the “Family & other users” tab in the settings. Click on the button “Add someone else to tis PC”

Step 6: In the window that appears, click on “I don’t have this person’s sign-in information”

Step 7: Then click on “Add a user without a Microsoft account”

Step 8: Fill in all the necessary fields, and then confirm the action by clicking “Next”

Step 9: After a new account is created, select a new profile and click on “Change account type”

Step 10: Choose “Administrator” from the suggested types and confirm the action by clicking “OK”

After completing the steps above, you must login to the new profile. To get rid of an already unneeded account, go to the accounts in settings and delete it

Note: This method is the simplest one, but as a rule, it is used very rarely.

Method 2: Renaming the user data folder in Windows 10 Home Edition

This method is suitable only for Windows 10 Home users. Also, after the procedure, some programs will need to be re-configured because they will not be able to find some configuration files due to changes in the file structure.

To start with, we need to activate the Administrator account. To do this, we need to:

Step 1: Right-click on the «Start» button and select «Windows PowerShell (Admin)»

tep 2: Type the «net user Adminisrtator /active:yes» command and press «Enter»

Now, you need to sign out of the current account and sign in to the account we just activated. To do this, press “Start”, then select “Power” and click “Sign Out”

After you sign out, select the administrator account that we activated earlier. If, for some reason, this account is not present on the screen, you need to restart your computer.

Now, go to the system directory with all user folders at C:\Users. Rename the user folder via the context menu or by pressing the F2 key.

After that, you need to make changes to the Windows Registry. To do this:

Step 1: Press the “Win+R” key combination, and in the window that appears, enter the system command “regedit” to start the registry editor.

Step 2: Go to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and double left-click on “ProfileList” folder. The contents of this folder should open up before us.

Step 3: Now, you need to find precisely the folder that links to our account. It will not be so easy to do because the folder names contain dashes and numbers. You should open each of them, paying attention inside to the value of the string “ProfileImagePath”, which indicates to which profile the folder links. To see the value of the string, you need to click on it twice.

Having found the necessary folder, enter the updated path to the user directory. Confirm the action by clicking “OK”.

Now you can close the registry editor. The only thing left is to disable the Administrator profile. To do this, launch the command prompt as Administrator and type the command “net user Administrator /active:no” Press “Enter” to confirm it.

Now it remains to restart the system and sign in to the account for which the changes were made.

Method 3: Renaming the user data folder in Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise

If you are using Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10 Enterprise, you should rename the user data folder:

Step 1: Log in to your profile with administrator rights, or activate your Administrator profile following the instructions described above.

Step 2: Open the Start context menu by pressing “Win+X” and clicking on “Computer Management”.

Step 3: Open “Local Users”, then open “Users” and select the field with the user name to be renamed, right-click on it and select “Rename”.

Step 4: Enter a new name, then click on any free space in the open window to save changes.

Step 5: Open the Explorer in any convenient way (for example, by pressing the Win+E keys) and change the user directory name, located at C:\Users

Step 6: Open the registry editor as described above and go to the list of profiles on the way: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. Find a folder with the required account, as described above.

Step 7: Double-click on the “ProfileImagePath” string and set a new custom directory path. Confirm the action by clicking “OK”, and close all windows.

Step 8: Open “Windows PowerShell (Admin)” and deactivate the administrator profile by typing “net user administrator /active:no”

After that, the procedure to change the name of the user directory can be considered fully completed. Now it is enough to sign out of the Administrator account, and go to the one for which all the actions were performed. If everything has been done correctly, there will be no system errors once the account is started.

What to do if, during the data folder renaming, or moving your information into new user data folder important data was lost?

Often, there are situations when the user can do something not according to instructions, or during the renaming of the data folder may occur system errors. Unfortunately, sometimes this can lead to the loss of important data that may have been stored on the desktop or elsewhere on disk C. Besides, there are often situations when due to the manipulations of inexperienced users, Windows stops working, and you have to reinstall the system, which almost always leads to formatting of disk C. What to do if important information was lost?

We strongly recommend you not to make hasty decisions and use a professional solution for data recovery RS Partition Recovery.

The program is easy to use and, therefore, suitable even for inexperienced users.

Besides, RS Partition Recovery successfully recovers lost data in 99% of cases. RS Partition recovery supports ALL modern file systems and data recovery from RAID arrays, which significantly emphasizes it among other programs for data recovery.

To recover a lost file you should:

Step 1. Install and launch the RS Partition Recovery.

All-in-one data recovery software

Step 2. Select the drive or partition from which you want to recover data.

Step 3. Choose the type of analysis.

Fast scan you should use in case the file was lost recently. The program will scan the drive quickly and show the files available for recovery.

The Full analysis function allows you to find lost data, after formatting, disc resizing, or file structure corruption (RAW).

Step 4. Preview and select the files to recover it.

Step 5. Add the files you want to save to the “Restore list” or select the entire partition and click Recovery.

It should be noted that it is best to save the recovered file to an external hard drive or USB flash drive.

The process of recovering the lost file will start, and once it is finished, the file will be available for use again.