Steam and its constituent games are huge. Say you want to move ALL the games to a new harddrive or just SOME of the games to a new harddrive to free up some space from your boot disk. Steam doesn't let you do this, but I do:P
Before you do any of these, exit from Steam including the systemtray icon (don't just minimize it)
Windows Vista or 7 1) Move the directories desired in full to a new location (don't leave the empty folder behind) using windows explorer
2) Run
mklink /j "C:\Program Files\Steam\" "D:\games\Steam" ("old location" "new location") from a command prompt. If you just want to move an individual game
mklink /j "C:\Program Files\Steam\game1" "D:\games\Steam\game1" Windows XP, Server 2003, or another NTFS OS 1) Download
linkd (part of a suite of tools) from the
Microsoft website or
junction from the
MS Sysinternals website.
Junction is only for XP, Vista, 7
2) Move the directories desired in full to a new location (don't leave the empty folder behind) using windows explorer
3) Run
x "C:\Program Files\Steam\" "D:\games\Steam" ("old location" "new location") from a command prompt. If you just want to move an individual game
x "C:\Program Files\Steam\game1" "D:\games\Steam\game1" where
x is either
linkd or
junction Linux or Mac OS X Use
ln -s in a similar fashion, but reverse the directory order (first the "new location" then the "old location"). Why can't anything ever be standardized?
Happy gaming.
Using any of these commands, you could move the directories again and re-link from the first location to the current location.
Limitations: 1) You can't move your steam from the present location and then the games back to exactly the same place as they used to be in the directory tree. Once you've created a link/junction, don't create another link/junction pointing back the other way. You could, however, have the games in c:\program files\GAMES\steam\game1 or some such location (rather than c:\program files\steam\game1.
2) Will NOT work on a FAT32 or FAT16 formatted volume (it might work if the first drive you had steam on was NTFS and the new was FAT32, but I have not tried this, so I wouldn't chance it)
3) There will be at least one access to the old NTFS volume, so your performance may be closer to the slower of the two drives involved. I think once the hardware drivers know where the files are REALLY going things will speed up a bit (assuming the new location is the faster disk). Read speed should be largely unaffected and should run CLOSE to the speeds of the new disk.
4) If you remove the old drive from your system, your shortcuts/junctions/links won't work anymore. And if you remove the new drive your games will be removed too.
5) If you delete the files from either location: they're gone. You can destroy the symbolic links without screwing yourself over though.
6) I'm not sure how backups will work. I guess it depends on if they are set to follow symbolic links or not. I'm pretty sure xxcopy has a switch for not following symlinks. Cloning/imaging should be just fine regardless, as that process copies datablocks, not files.
P.S. I'm too cheap to buy any steam games (downloading TF2 right now since it's free:P), but you can add me as
highdensitylipoprotein
post edited by pagelm - 2011/07/08 11:30:47