Okay, so to give an example use case, lets say I have several secured drives, each containing something like: X:\data (which would produce the line: datadir = "X:/data/" in my my.ini) X:\vhosts X:\www (site code) And then I have a few extra manual defines in my httpd.conf (less now thanks to you using the same system extensively in Zero XI) which declare the last two of these variables. This means that when I swap drive I only need to update 3 lines (2 in httpd.conf and 1 in my.ini) and everything will just work. I set all of my stuff up this way to keep it separate and this works very well in Uniform Server Coral (although I need a few extra defines there). This allows me to have only one version of the Server (and associated configs), but be able to run different sets of separate sites / data from it. The symlinking solution works absolutely fine, so I now have some extra .bat files unmounting and mounting the correct directories for MySQL (the rest works fine already), but it would be nicer not to do this and use the inbuilt options as before (accidental data deletion is possible with symlinks when unmounting if using del and not rmdir!). Normally this is not on a USB stick (but rather my main SSD), but it is handy to be able to use the same setup for other, older computers I use to test things where the data is in the same format with a single temporary copy to a USB stick. Hope this is clearer! Thanks, Paul