How To Move Your Steam Games To A Different Drive On Your Windows Computer
If you’re a PC gamer, you’re likely familiar with Steam. The games management software developed by Valve has become an industry standard, boasting a massive library of titles. Despite the efforts of companies like Epic Games to compete with their own launchers, Steam remains the storefront of choice for a large number of PC gamers. But if you’ve built up a library of games, there comes a time when storage restraints will necessitate moving your collection elsewhere on your PC. Can Steam accommodate that kind of game management?
There are plenty of reasons you might want to move your games. Maybe your boot drive is getting full, so you added a second drive for your games collection, or you’re just reorganizing your file system. Whatever the case, you’re looking for a no-fuss method to transfer your Steam games to that second drive. You might be worried that moving the games will cause Steam to lose track of them, and whatever else happens, you want to avoid waiting for games to redownload.
Thankfully,Steam is extremely customizableand makes the process of transferring your games to another location on your Windows PC relatively easy. You’ll still want to back up your games before proceeding, just in case, but in this guide, you’ll learn not only how to move your games, but how to do it safely. This process should work identically on any version of Windows, but for the best results, you’ll want to be on Windows 10 or 11. So, here’s how to safely and easily move your Steam games to a different folder or drive on your PC.
Creating a new path to install Steam games
Before you can move your Steam games to a new location on your Windows system, you will need to create a new Steam library. You can have multiple Steam libraries on your computer. Steam does not require all your games be stored in one place, so you can store any number of games in any number of libraries. To create a new Steam games storage location:
You have now created a new Steam games library location on your PC where games can be stored, but you still haven’t moved any of your games to that location.
Back up your games library before moving Steam games
Steam makes the process of moving your games to a different library path easy. However, despite the low risk of something going wrong, you should create a backup of the steamapps folder where your games are currently stored on before proceeding. If you don’t have enough room on your PC to duplicate the folder, you should use an external drive. Additionally, this will take some time, since each game must be backed up individually. If your games are already backed up, you can skip ahead to the next section of this article. Otherwise, here’s how to back up your Steam games:
You will need to back up each game individually. Repeat the following steps for each game you plan to move:
Once you’ve backed up all the games you plan to move, you may go to the next step, where you’ll finally relocate them. Be sure to account for anyhidden Steam gamesin your library, as well asgames with family sharing. If the backups are taking up too much space on your drive, you can delete them once you’ve moved the games and have verified that they run correctly and that their save files, if applicable, are intact.
Moving Steam games on your PC is easy
Now that you’ve created a new library, you may finally move your games there. Thankfully, Steam makes this an incredibly easy process. You won’t even need to touch your PC’s file system yourself. Here’s how to move your Steam games to a different drive on your Windows PC using an existing Steam library path:
All you need to do now is wait for the games to be moved over. This may take anywhere from a few seconds to many hours depending on how many games you have installed, how large their file sizes are, and how fast your computer’s read/write speeds are. As a general rule of thumb, for the same game, those who have M.4 style SSD storage installed will see quicker results, whereas the longest transfer times will affect those using older HDD drives.
How to make a particular drive the default for Steam games
If you’ve gone through the trouble of creating a new Steam library on your Windows PC and moving your games there, there’s a good chance you want that location to be the default for your Steam games going forward, so that every new game you download is automatically stored there. To make one of your existing Steam libraries the default one:
Going forward, this will ensure that games you download in the future are downloaded to the selected disk. Of course, you can always move games between libraries at any point using the instructions from the previous section of this article.
