Moving a Steam game to another drive is a simple and straightforward process that can help you free up space on your current drive while still enjoying.If you’re having trouble transferring games from Steam to another hard drive, this article is for you. We’ll cover a few tried and tested methods to help you transfer your game collection safely and quickly.
Important points
Before you start transferring games, we recommend that you make sure of the following:
- Access to your Steam account . Make sure you remember your login and password, and have access to the email linked to your account – this is necessary for possible password recovery.
- Installation location : If possible, do not install Steam and its games on an external hard drive to avoid performance degradation.
- Backups . We strongly recommend that you copy the steamapps folder in advance, as this is where all the main game files are stored. In case of any failure, this will allow you to recover without re-downloading.
Through Steam’s built-in functions
Method 1: Completely Transferring the Steam Folder
If you need to transfer the entire Steam directory with all installed projects at once, follow the following sequence:
- Quit Steam. Just in case, close the program and disable all related processes via the Task Manager.
- Locate your current Steam folder, which by default is located at C:Program Files (x86)Steam .
- Delete all unnecessary files except steamapps, userdata and steam.exe . Steamapps contains your games, and userdata contains some of your personal settings.
- Move the entire folder (cut and paste) to another location, for example: ( D:MyGamesSteam ) .
- Launch Steam by double-clicking steam.exe from the new location and enter your login details.
- Additionally, check the integrity of the files.
The second way
In some cases, when Steam starts in a new directory, errors may occur due to incorrect entries in the Windows registry or other conflicts. In this case, try the following:
- Exit Steam and terminate all client processes;
- Find the new folder where you moved Steam ( D: MyGamesSteam ) and copy the steamapps folder to your desktop so that it is temporarily outside the client directory;
- Uninstall Steam;
- Install Steam;
- Move the steamapps folder back to the new Steam directory so that your game content and saves are in their proper places;
- Launch Steam. If necessary, check the integrity of the installed games files – now you can safely launch them from the new location.
Important note about save files
Many games that don’t support Steam Cloud save your progress in a subfolder called “Documents”, for example: ( C:Users[Username]DocumentsMy Games ) Copy the corresponding folder to a similar location on the new drive.
Through the Steam Library Manager program
For those who prefer a more automated approach, there is the Steam Library Manager, a special utility that simplifies the movement of game directories:
- Download the Steam.Library.Manager.zip archive, unzip it and run the program.
- On first launch, set the language, select a design, configure update checks, and specify the path to your current Steam library, then click Next.
- In the Library tab on the right, you’ll see a list of all detected installed Steam libraries, which are the drives and folders where your games are stored.
- If you need to create a new folder, do it inside the program (the “Create library” button at the bottom left). Specify the path and select “Steam”. If the program asks to close the client, agree.
- Return to the list of games, drag the desired project to the newly created library. Go to the “Task Manager” tab, check “Delete source files” and click “Run”.
- Wait until the operation status changes to “Completed”. After that, open Steam, right-click on the transferred game – “Properties” – “Local Files” and make sure that the path matches the new location.We hope this article will help you move your games to another hard drive. If you follow the proven instructions and remember to back up, the whole process won’t take you long!