Run out of HDD space for Steam Games ? Heres a fix.

neoglow

neoglow

neoglow

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With another year of the Steam Sales, theres going to be a lot of HDD space being eaten up to store all your awesome new cheap games.

If like me, your starting to run out of space on your HDD and your Steam directory is the main cause of it, then there is solutions to this problem.

As you may know all your Steam games are stored in the steamapps folder and Steam does not let you choose the location to install games. You can move your steam store folder to another larger capacity HDD but you cannot 'split' your game library across different drives.

Thankfully there are solutions, there may be others but I came across these whilst searching, I thought this may be useful as the Steam Sale continues and we look forward to another sale at christmas.

GameSave Manager - http://www.gamesave-manager.com/ (Supports all Windows including XP)
SteamTool Library Manager - http://stefanjones.ca/steam/ (Windows Vista or Windows 7, no XP support)
Steam Mover - http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover (Windows Vista or Windows 7, no XP support)

Happy downloading!

EDIT - Just to point out, SteamTool does not support XP, its due to 'incomplete support for NTFS junctions' (check the wikipedia link on SteamTool's link above). However, Gamesave Manager does support XP.
 
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Interesting, I will have a look at this when I get home. Always annoyed me that my 150GB raptor keeps filling up while my 500GB remains almost unused.
 
PapaLazaru said:
Does this work for Origin games? I want to move BF3 to my SSD and keep the rest on my mechanical. :)
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Im not sure, I would guess that GameSave Manager may be able to do it as its not a steam only application and it uses 'symbolic links' to redirect folders to other locations/drives. I think when windows or the game looks in a folder to load files, GameSave Manager acts as a forwarding point or access point and redirects it to where the files are actually stored on a different drive.
 
Antar Bolaeisk said:
These are just guis for the mklink command so you could always nerd out and use the command prompt to achieve the same effect.
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if I was a nerd I would but I have no idea how. :o

Tempted just to move the BF3 folder over and then point Origin at it. Don't really play the other games on it tbh. That should work, should it not?
 
I want away to get my skyrim saves to be on my larger hard drive, along with my steam games. I hate the way that 1000 saves take up about 3gb. 3gb is a lot on a 50gb SSD ith windows 7 installed....
Will the game save manager do that?
 
That Steammover looks like it will work. You can just choose the start folder, ie Electronic Arts, copy it over then point it to the new folder.
 
marc1024 said:
I hate the way that 1000 saves take up about 3gb
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Realistically though do you actually NEED access to all 1000 save games? Chances are you will probably only touch maybe 10% of those, say 10 characters with 10 saves each? My recommendation would be to archive all but the 10 most important saves from each character.
 
You can split your steam apps across drives. Google a little programme called steamtool. Its free and lets you keep steam on 1 drive and runs games off another. been using it a long time.

Edit. Just noticed you did post that. Well anyway it works great
 
I use a SSD and then a main HDD with my steam games on. I use steam mover to easily move games from my HDD to my SSD. I am 99% sure you can use it to move anything from any director so should work for the origin games.

I got BF3 recently and have it on my SSD but i really can't remeber if i installed it straight to the SSD or used steam mover, i think i used steam mover but not 100%
 
mlink /? will pretty much tell you all you need to know to use it without any real nerding required, its a fairly simple program.
 
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