Hi @Codelime!
In general, there are no technical requirements with regards to the location where you should keep your AEM instances, source code or other AEM-related files.You can choose whatever fit's best into your way of working and general data hierarchy on your machine. There are a couple of things to take into account, though.
- In many corporate environments, there will be limitations on where you can or should store working files/data. So this will limit your choices to certain areas on your hard disk.
- AFAIK, there are limitations with regards to the maximum number of characters a file path can have on Windows systems. If I remember correctly, this is somewhere around 256 characters for the full path. As you do not have full control over system generated files and structures inside your working directories, you may want to place your root folder at one of the lower levels of the file system and not deeply buried with the root path already consuming 250 characters of that limit.
- Please also consider backups and syncing (e. g. to an external storage, such as hard disks, NAS or cloud storages) of your files. Is your whole system part of a regular backup? Or are you only syncing certain areas/folders?
- You probably want to keep your working files on a local disk and only backup/sync them to external storages. While it's possible to place your working environment on e. g. a network share, this will usually have negative effects on performance and you may not be able to work if there are any network issues.
Personally, I have setup a dedicated "Development" hierarchy as a sibling to the default "Documents", "Music" and "Photos" folders within my user directory. I used to have that "Development" folder on the root level of my hard disk but moved it some time ago.
Hope that helps!
