i currently keep my retail/live wow folder on my SSD c:\ drive, and the classic/beta/ptr are in my D:\program files\ folder. am I correctly presuming the cleanup will keep the data folder in c: installation and remove the ones in the d: installations ?
Can’t wait for this change. It will be nice to not have separate installations.
I see this breaking. I see it causing problems cause in my paranoid little head it seems like any time they make advancements something goes wrong.
Oh well.
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Any word on font/sound mods (which are allowed by Blizzard)? Currently I have the original rogue and bow/gun sounds installed at /World of Warcraft/Sounds/. I assume that would go under /World of Warcraft/__retail__/Sounds/ now?
Thanks for this heads up, it reminded me I had to move my screen shots to another folder. I take way to many screen shots.
This is critical information and SHOULD get pinned!
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Yes it should.
Thanks for the heads up. Important as well since I Symlink folders on Dropbox to make sure my addons DB, addon Files, and Screenshots Sync across multiple computers. I wonder how the BattleNet app is going to see this. It should do a few tests on file to see if it is a symlinked file before attempting to move it or I could see a lot of confusion for people.
Not 100% sure on that sorry. Depends on what the battle.net team come up with. I would expect an update to the battle net desktop app coming down the line
Despite not using the Data files from the PTR post 8.1 there is still value in the user creatable and modifiable folders left behind (screenshots , wtf , logs and errors for example). People may want to keep records of that particularly for addon authors that would like to keep a copy of their WTF and Interface folders for example.
Yes I would expect to work that way. If you have a PTR installed you could test this yourself as the 8.1 PTR has had the new file structure for a while now.
No word on if sound modifications is still possible. Someone should go test that on the PTR 
#stillatbeach 
I was wondering why it was being shown like this. I just thought to myself “Man what did I break this time. I’ll fix it later”.
I thought the same thing. 
I suppose they’ll move your sound folder to where it belongs during the conversion . I’d prefer it remains in the root folder so it applies to all versions of the game. And, just in case they disappear it, I just backed up mine. It would take forever to find all the sound file names and paths to kill them again.
Thanks for the heads up. Does this mean I need to make a backup of my screenshots just in case?
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Expect this to break everything for a minute!
This could probably be done with symlinks pointing to /World of Warcraft/Sound/ placed under /_retail_/ and /_ptr_/. Most programs can’t differentiate symlinks from real folders and will just read from them as if the symlinks were folders. Will test this later on.
Thanks for the heads up, as I keep my ptr and live on separate drives, with my live on a small fast ssd.
Tried a shortcut, didn’t work. Looked up Symlink… Created a relative one with “mklink /D Sound …\Sound” and it works. Oddly, the link still shows up as a shortcut in the GUI.
I’ve always had better luck with JUNCTIONS on Windows and WoW (mklink /j)
I’m a little confused, or maybe I’m just not really understanding.
I thought that when 8.1 went live, it would move the PTR files into the main folder and delete all of the extra PTR data, eliminating having to have two data files for each install. Did I misunderstand? I even tried uninstalling the PTR and reinstalling, but it kept wanting to copy over the data from the retail folder into the “World of Warcraft Public Test” folder, instead of just using/adding onto the existing data file in “World of Warcraft”. I even tried manually adding the _ptr_ into the main wow folder, but the client couldn’t find the PTR.
I guess the data file isn’t really ‘shared’ between both installs, eliminating the need to have two large data files, but more so eligible to be copied? or is it just something coming later on?
In other words, I thought that it would mean that both _ptr_ and _retail_ would be in the “World of Warcraft” folder, sharing the same “Data” folder in that main “World of Warcraft” folder, but trying to install the PTR still creates the additional “World of Warcraft Public Test” with its own Data folder, which copies data from the “World of Warcraft” data folder, instead of reusing existing data to save space.