Steam is a popular online game distribution platform by Valve Software, the creators of Half-Life. It was definitely one of the first movers in the niche and moved from a rough start to a popular platform used by millions of gamers. Steam for the most part works just fine, the platform does have a few issues though like the inability to store games on different hard drives if storage space runs out or the high price of new games.
I have addresses the storage issue in the past here on Ghacks. It all started with the guide How To Move Large Apps Or Games To Another Drive, followed by a review of Steam Mover which has been specifically designed for Steam.
Especially the rise of Solid State Drives has fueled the development of tools such as Steam Mover, or Steam Tool Library Manager which I review today.
The program, just like all the others, is using NTFS Junctions to move Steam games to another hard drive. For that, it requires that Steam is installed on an NTFS partition. Here is how it works.
You need to install the software before it can be used. Steam and your games collection are identified automatically by Steam Tool Library Manager. It is not possible to switch directories or to select directories that already contain data, Steam Mover is more flexible in this regard.
All you need to do is to pick a destination directory on the right side of the interface. Just browser to a folder on another hard drive where you want to store some of your Steam games to make room on the Steam partition. Once done select a Steam game and click on the Move to Storage button.
The program will do its magic and move the game to the new folder on the selected hard drive. This changes nothing game wise. You can still start the game via Steam. All data will be saved to the new directory though. The best way to describe it is that the tool redirects all requests from the original game directory to the new directory.
Steam Tool Library Manager has not been updated for a year which is the biggest issue that I have with the program. The program itself works fine though. Windows users can download the latest version of Steam Tool Library Manager from the developer website.
Update: The website is not responding right now. I have uploaded the latest version of the program to the Ghacks server. You can download it from here: Steam Tool Library Manager (618)
Related Articles:
Steam Mover, Automated Tool To Move Games And Apps To Other DrivesHow To Move The Steam Folder To Another Drive
Move Steam To Another Hard Drive
How To Add Third Party Games To Steam
How To Move Large Apps Or Games To Another Drive
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hey Martin first off GREAT LEARNING SITE
I tried http://www.stefanjones.ca/steam/ on several browsers and
all report Server cannot be found
so I googled and found several links but alas all the same
Server cannot be found :(
It worked half an hour ago, that is really strange. I have uploaded the latest setup file to the Ghacks server. The link is now in the article.
Thanx !!! heaps for uploading
I’ve always been frustrated by Steam forcing installs to my C: drive, especially after I installed a SSD. This is exactly what I need and works great so far. Thanks a bunch!
I installed steam to my new external one terabyte harddrive… no prob transferring my games…
Y’all???
Guys, the solution is even easier. I have a SSD for my OS (C:\) and two SATA HDD in RAID (D:\) where all my Steam games are installed by default.
Solution is very simple and does not require any third-party tool, simply install Steam on D:\ (or whatever drive you’d like) and all your games data will be copied there as by default Steam will install its game in a subfolder.
In my case I have D:\Games\Steam and all games are in in that directory in \common I think…
The tool mentioned above can be useful if you do not want to re-download all your games; but even with Steam you could easily achieve the same results.
Let’s say you have Steam on C:\ and want to move everything on D:\
- For each game you want to reinstall, go to library, right-click it and choose the option to backup the game data; it’ll create a .exe that you can reuse later on to import it back.
- Once all your games data is backed up, uninstall Steam
- Reinstall Steam on the other drive you want your games to be (eg D:\)
- One by one, re-import the games you’ve backed up simply by double clicking the .exe that have been generated.
This method can also be used to move games between computer and not having to re-download everything
Thomas I’d like to comment on your method. You can actually move the Steam files to another drive so that you do not have to go through the backup – restoration process. Second, the method described allows you to move individual games to another drive. You could move game d to drive d:, game e to drive e: and keep game c on the c: drive. Your method is fine (sans the backup restoration part) if you want to move Steam and all games to another drive or partition.
Just out of curiosity, why would one want to have games installed on all different drives? Maybe I’m missing something here. Do you mean, just because? As in, we should have total control over all elements of our gaming and such. If we want to install each game on a different drive, we should be able to? I transferred everything over to my largest, fastest drive and I am completely confused as to why anyone would want to do differently… No offense intended.
No offense taken. Depending on the games in your account, you may run out of disk space. Plus, and that was my case, you have some users who are using Solid State Drives which come with less available space.
This method works great if you have a really large game directory and a not so large ssd. You can keep the games you want to load very fast on the ssd, and keep the games you dont mind loading slower on a traditional spindle drive. SSD greatly helps loading times on certain multiplayer games as well as general smoothness
Chris, that’s exactly what I’m doing.