There are times when you may need more space on your system drive or windows drive by default which is set to C:. In this situation only option left is uninstalling some applications which may not be possible for many users as there may be important applications for daily use. By default Windows does not provide any options to move installed applications from default drive to another drive, doing so manually may leave the applications useless. Steam Mover can help in situations like this.
Stream Mover is a portable windows freeware application for Windows 7 and Vista that can move installed Windows applications from one hard drive to another without hampering its functionality or registry entries.
- The Steam Mover interface shows a list of all the games in your Steam library as well as their actual location and size. You can easily move games back and forth between drives, which can be useful if you want to run frequently used games from a faster (but smaller) SSD drive and keep others on a storage drive.
- If you’ve been gaming on Valve’s Steam service for a decent amount of time, you’ve probably heard of Steam Mover. It’s a great tool for transferring your multi-gigabyte Steam games to different.
- Thinking of using steam mover - posted in Computer Gaming: I was wanting a 3rd HD so i can move my game client games to them using steam mover, has anyone heard of it, used is it easy to use.
Note that Steam Mover can be used to move any folder around (by changing the Source Path), but for Steam the maximum benefit is in moving individual games from the Common folder. I simply select a few games I don't play very often, and click the 'Right Arrow' button. This fires off a few command line windows - please let them run to completion.
How Steam Mover Works
- Run the application and you will find the main window on which you have to work upon.
- In the Stream apps common folder you have to put the folder in which your applications are installed. The alternative folder is the path where the programs have to be moved.
- Once the source and destination folders are set you can use the arrow button to move the application in between the folders.
Download Steam Mover – Move Installed Windows Applications To Other Drives
Have you run out of space on your C: drive?
Or do you have a super-fast SSD that is too small to hold all your steam games at the same time?
Then try Steam Mover.
Following on from a very interesting post on the Steam forums I've created a little app to make moving the files and creating the junction points much much easier!
Example Use
Here I have my steam folder in the default location, and the application should find that for you. If not, select the SteamSteamAppsCommon folder yourself, and a secondary hard disk D:, where I have created a folder.
Note that Steam Mover can be used to move any folder around (by changing the Source Path), but for Steam the maximum benefit is in moving individual games from the Common folder.
I simply select a few games I don't play very often, and click the 'Right Arrow' button. This fires off a few command line windows - please let them run to completion.
It is using the built-in Windows commands: xcopy, rd, and mklink. If you want to see the exact commands it is running, tick the 'I want to run the commands myself' box.
Once finished, you will see that I have moved Left 4 Dead and World of Goo to my D: drive, but because of the Junction Points created on the C: drive the games continue to work in Steam.
If you want to move games back to your C: drive, simply click on the left arrow button.
Pro's
- You can store all your steam games on multiple drives, and they all carry on working! You no longer have to do the install/uninstall shuffle to get enough disk space on drive C: for that latest game.
- You can benefit from that fast, but small, SSD drive by only storing the games you regularly play on the SSD, and moving the older games onto a slower larger hard disk. And all games remain playable in steam.
- If you want to see what it's doing and run the commands from the command line yourself, tick the 'I want to run the commands myself' box. Note that SteamMover runs commands one at a time, and stops if it gets an error.
- I actually now install steam and all games on my large D: HDD, and use Steam Mover to just move my favourite games to the C: SSD for a speed boost when playing them.
Con's
- No warranty. Whatsoever.
- Things may go wrong. I accept no liability of lost files, yadda, yadda. Its moving a lot of files around, without much checking on permissions, so it may not be perfect. It does work fine for me though. If it does break you may have to copy/move files around yourself, restore from a backup, or re-download your steam games. Please leave feedback below if you get an error, and I shall endevour to fix it in the next release.
- Requires Microsoft Windows Vista or above (Windows 7, 8, 8.1 are all reported to work fine). It will NOT work on Windows XP.
- It requires NTFS formatted drives. It will not work with FAT32.
- Junction Points can only relocate complete folders, not individual files. So unfortunately it will not help with the massive .gcf files in the steamapps folder itself (mostly Valve games such as Counter-Strike and the Half-Life series). To those that have asked, I have tried using mklink to create hardlinks, but they do not work to link to another drive - they only provide a shortcut to a file on the same drive.
Download
SteamMover v0.1 1168k
Please ensure you download from the above link - various 'cracked' or 'official' versions are hosted on other sites, which is hilarious seeing as its freeware.
Version History
v0.1 - 2nd April 2010
The initial release. So far, it's been so good that it hasn't needed updating. :-)
Installation
Its a Delphi Application, and no installer is required. Just unzip to wherever you want and run SteamMover.exe. If you get permission errors when moving folders you may need to right-click and 'Run as Administrator'.
Uninstall
Simply delete the SteamMover.exe, and if you really want you can remove the Registry keys from HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareSteamMover.
Steam Mover 2020
Notable Mentions
- Hundreds of thousands of downloads, over 1000 feedback comments from users
- On the sidebar of /r/steam/
Steam Mover Review
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