According to your description, seems you are using TFVC as your source control in TFS.
There is a mapping relationship for your local folder and source control folder in server. In general, you should map your entire project to a single local folder under c:\Users\YourName\Source\Workspaces. For example:
Some tips on effective folder names:
- Keep all folder, sub-folder, and file names short to simplify your work and avoid potential long-path issues that can occur with some types of code projects.
- Avoid whitespace if you want make command-line operations a little easier to perform. If your team has a large and complex codebase or if you want your workspace to contain only the files you need to improve performance, you can optimize your workspace.
You could they change your local path according to your requirements here. After you changed, you may need to do a get latest to sync up all changes. If you do not need files download in original local path, simply delete them.
Also there is another case in which I am interesting in: If I has a branch already assigned to a local path within a workarea and I want to remove this and keep it again as unassigned how can I do it?
You just need to remove workspace mapping, you could do this from three ways.
- From VS
- From VS on a different machine
- From the command line
More detail please refer Bogdan Gavril MSFT's reply in this question: How to remove a TFS Workspace Mapping?