But I've been able to move games manually. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a built-in way to move a game from one library folder to another (except deleting it and reinstalling it to a different location, which involves downloading it again). Steam now allows you to have multiple libraries, so you can have one for each drive. Moving this folder to the same location on your new hard drive will maintain your saves/profiles. If you are moving your Steam installation to a new hard drive and want to keep game saves/profiles for third party games that are not saved on Steam Cloud most of these can be found in your Documents folder: ~\Documents\My Games. Start Steam and log in to your existing Steam account to confirm that the move was successful.Move the SteamApps folder into the new Steam installation folder to copy all of your downloaded game content, settings, and saved games to the new location.Review the Installing Steam topic for instructions to re-install Steam to the desired location.
Review the Uninstalling Steam topic for instructions to uninstall Steam (this must be done to remove your old Steam installation settings from the Windows Registry).Move the SteamApps folder from the Steam installation folder to your desktop.Browse to the Steam installation folder for the Steam installation (continuing the from the last section example, this would be the new location of D:\Games\Steam.If you encounter any errors during the move process or when Steam is launched from the new location, it may be necessary to perform a more thorough process: All future game content will be downloaded to the new folder (D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\ in this example)
Steam will briefly update and then you will be ready to play.
It is not recommended that you install Steam to an external hard drive due to potential performance issues.
Also ensure that your account is linked to your current email address so that you can reset your password if necessary. Please ensure that you have your Steam account name and password before following this procedure. If Steam is already installed, you may move the installation to another location, such as a different hard drive using the following process. The game files must be in the SteamApps folder in order to function. Since Steam relies on the game files residing in the SteamApps folder, your game files cannot be moved outside of this folder. Still, Steam’s newfound feature a good start-especially for those with limited SSD space who are constantly moving installs around.Steam installs to the following folder by default:įiles for games installed on Steam are stored in the following folder:ĭuring the installation of Steam, you have the option to install Steam to a location other than the default. Hopefully that functionality is on the way. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to batch-move a bunch of games yet, so those looking to migrate an entire hard drive’s worth of games are probably better off using the ol’ drag-and-drop method for the time being.
Right-click on a game, select Properties, then Local Files, and at the bottom you’ll see a button tagged “Move Install Folder.” Click it and you’ll be presented with a list of all your available Steam library locations.
And Steam wouldn’t even register a game’s presence if you moved it over from an external drive, instead continuing to show you an “Install” button in the client until after it’d gone through this verification process. After moving an install, Steam needed to re-verify all of the game’s files one at a time to make sure nothing got screwed up.
The problem is Steam didn’t like this latter option much.