Well, I feel like the greenest possible newbie asking this, but... I am new to Pd and installed Pd-extended 0.42.5 on my Win7 x64 laptop a few months ago.

Pd seems to have set up a directory for my own patches, and I can open them without a problem in Pd itself. But I cannot find them, nor the directory that Pd seems to have created to hold them, in any other filesystem management tool.

When I go to open a patch in Pd, it clearly shows a subdirectory with my name on it in the C:\Program Files (x86)\pd directory. This is "where" Pd is putting my files, but it is not visible in any other app.

As best as I can tell, this is not a symlink (in Windows parlance, "shortcut") nor is it a hidden subdir. But I'm guessing it *has* to be a symlink. I can't tell much about it from the Pd file-browsing dialog, which is of course the only place I can see it.

None of the usual suspects (C:\Users\(me)\appdata\*, c:\Program Files (x86)\pd\extra\*, c:\Users\(me)\Documents\*) seem to be housing the patches either.

What am I missing?

Did you try doing a search for the files and seeing if they come up somewhere else?

I don't really use Windows much, but you don't need to be saving your patches there. Just save them somewhere where you can easily find them, like your Documents folder. Generally, the stuff in Program Files is stuff you shouldn't really be messing with.

I did do a search, but came up with nothing. This doesn't mean much; Windows file searching is legendarily horrible.

I know I don't "need" to be doing saves there and I've started doing it in a folder I've actually created. However, there are about 30-40 (lousy) patches there I'd like to be able to easily move en masse, and the easiest approach would be to know where the darn things are actually located.

(And while there are other approaches, sure, well, this is also a mystery I'd just like to solve on principle.)

There's no issue with messing around within the Program Files / Windows / AppData directories if you usually have a clue what you're doing, and it's often necessary to do so when dealing with apps that have been ported to Windows as an afterthought.

Regardless, this was the default location that Pd chose to "place" the (...possible?!) symlink, right there next to its own binary executable, and I did not know I had an issue of any kind until it came time to back things up.