Preface: This is a personal opinion, not an official company statement, but does reflect prevalent internal thoughts on the topic.
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We are moving the direction of not allowing installation of Laserfiche software anywhere but the default C:\ drive locations, so that update is unlikely to happen.
The most frequent (nearly universal) reason we're given for installing Laserfiche software on a drive other than C:\ is some form of an IT policy preferring "Separating apps and OS". But this, in our view, only causes data fragmentation, generates confounding support cases, and provides no meaningful benefits for Laserfiche software.
The vast majority of Laserfiche application data, excluding repository volumes, search catalogs, and databases, is stored in C:\ProgramData\Laserfiche\*. That path is generally not configurable except for the Workflow Server File System location. If something goes haywire and starts writing out endless data, it's almost certainly going to happen in a C:\ProgramData\ folder and having the apps installed on a different disk won't help you there. Other critical data is stored in Windows registry keys. Laserfiche software is not neatly self-contained within their Program Files directory and thinking installing them on a different drive provides any meaningful isolation is broadly false.
This structure also means there are no backup and recovery benefits. If a server's OS dies for any reason, you cannot simply detach and reattach a D:\ drive to a new server and have much of anything work, because it'll be missing all the \ProgramData\ and registry entries. The Repository Windows Client would plausibly still run with default config data, but I wouldn't count on much more than that.
On nearly every system where Laserfiche apps are installed on a separate D:\ (etc.) drive, at some point during an upgrade someone clicks through the installer's install location screen without updating the path. Then you end up with some of the software having install folders under both C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\ and D:\Program Files\Laserfiche\, with no obvious way to tell which one is "active" unless you go look up the app's install path registry key. This exposes you to an entire class of painful issues.
I've worked on support cases where we spent hours troubleshooting why changes to "D:\Program Files\Laserfiche\Laserfiche Forms\Forms\Web.config" didn't seem to be taking effect, only to discover that the latest Forms upgrade had been installed to C:\Program Files\.
Another issue I've seen is when there's are Workflow custom activity or script references to DLLs in "D:\Program Files\Laserfiche\Workflow", a Workflow upgrade is inadvertently installed to the default C:\Program Files\, the custom DLLs are of course not automatically copied over, and those custom/script activities start failing with "Reference not found" type errors. There are plenty more examples like these. It's a nightmare.
Storage isn't a good reason either. Having every single Laserfiche application installed together takes up under 6 GB, an inconsequential amount of storage on any modern server. If you're really up against available storage on your C:\ drive, expand it by 10-20 GB instead of adding a whole new drive. If you're that tight on C:\ drive storage, you need more buffer for Windows Update temp space anyway.
So, to recap, installing Laserfiche software on a different drive:
- Does not provide any meaningful isolation of application data and instead fragments it across drives
- Does not provide any backup and recovery benefits
- Introduces an entire new category of configuration mishaps that occur with high frequency and cause real issues
- Does not meaningfully save C:\ drive space because Laserfiche software installations do not use much space in a modern context
In the event we still end up allowing non-default installation locations with the upcoming new installers, we're likely to strongly recommend against it. If we do not allow non-default install paths, for in-place upgrades of existing non-default location installs, we plan to help automate (to the extent feasible) copying relevant configurations/files to the new, default install location to help avoid the same types of config issues described earlier.
If anyone has particularly compelling reasons for installing Laserfiche software at a custom path, we would genuinely like to hear what those are. This is the time where that feedback would be actionable.