Minion hardcodes Documents folder
 

Hi, thanks for making Minion it's really useful. I have noticed one minor issue though:

I'm using OneDrive's built-in feature to backup my Documents folder, this works by moving the folder inside my OneDrive folder. The end result of this is that my Documents folder is located at C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\Documents. Most programs deal with this fine but some, such as Minion, hard code the Documents folder location to be in C:\Users\<user>\Documents.

After installing Minion a new "fake" Documents folder is created in the root of my user folder, inside this folder is a shortcut to "C:\Users\<user>\.minion" and nothing else. Minion was also unable to find my Addons folder automatically, I'm not sure if this is caused by the same issue of if Minion just doesn't have that feature.

This problem would also affect people who have manually moved their Documents folder (this can be done by going to the Document folder's property page and then going to the Location tab). Minion should query the OS or the registry (HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Personal) to find the actual location of the Documents folder and use that.

Thanks again for the software.

It's a known problem and ESO is not supporting this, it's not Minion! ESO won't read your documents/live/AddOns folder anymore as it was moved to OneDrive and thus all addons are missing/not found anymore.
You need to disable this OneDrive documents backup OR use something like Symlink/MKlink for windows to redirect your c:\users\...\documents\elder scrolls online folder to your OneDrive folder. And even then it might trouble ESO. You can easily check this by adding addons to your documents folder and check if ES shows and updates the SavedVariables etc. properly ingame. If it works you are one of the small amount of lucky guys wher eit does :)

About Minion:
In fact YOU specify the addons folder within Minion yourself, as you define the game and it's addons folder! So if you try to point it to the OneDrive folder it should work, or maybe could. But as one can easily point it to something like d:\documents (after moving the documents folder) this should work as well as long as OneDrive is not blocking the access. So maybe Minion needs to be started with admin / priviledged rights then.

Hi Baertram, thanks for the reply.

For me ESO itself has always worked fine using the OneDrive backup feature. In fact I just built my new PC last weekend, I reinstalled ESO and launched it without doing anything else and all my Addons were already installed because OneDrive had already synced the files from my old PC's Documents folder.

Just to be clear I have Minion working with my setup. The "complaint" (very minor nickpicky inconvenience really) is that when I installed Minion it made a new empty fake Documents folder in C:\Users\<user>\Documents that has nothing in it except a shortcut file, I don't know what the purpose of this shortcut is but it's annoying that it doesn't put it in my real Documents folder.

I was also speculating whether the reason Minion did not automatically find my Addons folder is because of this incorrect Documents folder hardcoding (but I don't know if automatically finding the Addons folder is even a Minion feature). To be clear when I manually specified the folder it worked (although for some reason I had to restart Minion before it showed any addons).

Okay, understood.
I guess the link is due to the Minion installer (setup routines used) and not Minion itsself. Maybe it's Minion also not properly using the way to detect the %USERPROFILE%/documents folder, but uses c:\users\...\documents under some circumstances. But I actually never had that happen and I'm using symlinks, tried OneDrive and other stuff with it already.

The restart (and sometimes even multiple times) before addons are shown after a new Minion install/addons folder reset is a known bug.
Should be listed in the troubleshooting forum sticky thread.