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Learn how to move your Steam games between hard drives on PC
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Running out of hard drive space because of how many games you have installed? If you play games on Steam, you've probably encountered this problem a number of times. Video game file sizes seem to keep getting bigger, and it can be annoying to uninstall and reinstall your games over and over. Thankfully Steam has made it easy to move your game files from one Windows hard drive to another, and we'll teach you all of the methods in this article.
Things You Should Know
- You can move individual games or your entire Steam library to a new drive, depending on your needs.
- If the game you are moving has a large file size, it may take some time for it to fully transfer over to the new drive.
- Make sure to back up your games just in case something goes wrong in the transfer process.
Steps
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Open the Storage Manager. In Steam, click the Steam menu in the top left corner and click Settings. Select Downloads midway down the left-hand sidebar of the Settings window, and then select the Steam Library Folders button to open the Storage Manager.
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Create a new Steam library folder. At the top of the Storage Manager, you should see your current Steam library folder (most likely on your C drive).
- Click the little plus sign button next to your current Steam library folder.
- In the pop-up window, click the dropdown menu at the top and select the drive you'd like to add a new Steam library folder in.
- Once selected, hit the Select . The new drive should then appear in the Storage Manager.
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Move your games. There are two ways to move your games between hard drives once you've set up a new Steam library folder: Via the Storage Manager or the Game Library. You should already be in the Storage Manager if you finished the previous step, and the Game Library can be found by clicking Library at the top of the main Steam window.
- Storage Manager
:
- Scroll through your games in the Storage Manager.
- Click the correlating checkbox on the right side of the game you want to remove.
- Click the Move button.
- Select the hard drive you want to move the games to and then click Move.
- Games Library
:
- In your Steam games list, right-click the game you want to move and select Properties…
- In the pop up window, select Local Files in the sidebar menu, and then click Move install folder… .
- In the new window select the drive you want to move the game to from the dropdown menu and click Move.
- Once the game is done moving, you can repeat this process for all games you want to move. [1] X Research source
- Storage Manager
:
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Wait for the games to finish transferring. If your game's file size is large, it may take some time for the game to move between drives.
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Back up the “steamapps” folder. While it isn't required to back up your steamapps folder, it is recommended. If something goes wrong with the process of moving your Steam installation and you don't have a backup, you will have to install all your Steam games again.
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Navigate to your Steam installation folder. First, make sure Steam is not running. Then navigate to your Steam installation folder, which is by default C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam.
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Delete some files. Delete all of the files and folders inside this folder except for the steamapps and userdata folders and the steam.exe file.
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Move the Steam folder to the new drive location. Cut the entire Steam folder by right clicking the folder and selecting Cut. Navigate to the location you would like to move your Steam installation, such as your new hard drive, and paste the Steam folder by right-clicking anywhere inside the File Explorer pane and selecting Paste.
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Log in to Steam and verify game files. Once the Steam folder has finished moving to the new drive, try logging in to Steam. After logging in, the client will briefly update and complete the login process.
- For each installed game, verify the integrity of the game files to ensure the games transferred properly and fixed damaged files. To verify the integrity, right-click on the game in the games list and select Local Files from the left-hand sidebar menu. Then select Verify integrity of game files… and allow the process to complete before trying to play the game. [2] X Research source
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Troubleshoot, if necessary. If you are getting errors after moving your Steam installation, you may need to do a more thorough process.
- Exit Steam completely and navigate to your new Steam installation folder. Move the steamapps folder to your Desktop.
- Uninstall Steam and then reinstall it to the new desired hard drive. Move the steamapps folder from your Desktop to the new Steam installation folder. [3] X Research source
- After this process is completed, try to log in and verify your game files once more.
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Retrieve your save files. If you have saved games that aren't on the Steam cloud and want to transfer those over as well, go to Documents\My Games. The save files should be in this folder and you can move it to the hard drive Steam is now on to continue using those saves.
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