Welcome to another Tech Tip Tuesday, and today i'm going to show you how to move your game library
to another hard drive. So no matter whether you're with blizzards battle.net, EA origins,
epic games, steam or the windows xbox game pass, i will show you how to move your entire game
library to another hard drive, and also how to move it to an external hard drive as well,
and show you a couple of extra steps that will allow you to use an external hard drive to play
those games on any pc in your house without having to download to lots of different locations. I'll
also give you my verdict at the end of it of which solution i think is suitable for which purpose.
welcome to My Tech Gear, let's get into it!
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So the first thing we want to do is set up our new hard drive. So whether that's external or intel it
doesn't really matter too much for this purpose. Hopefully you will have a new drive. If it's an
external drive, i've plugged this in, and it's my drive that's here, and i've labeled it as 'Z'.
You might have D, E, F, G, or whatever, but it should be all set up. Now if you haven't formatted
it already then you should go and do that as well. Now one thing that i would say is really useful,
if you're going to use an external hard drive and you want to use it across multiple PCs,
is set a fixed letter for your hard drive that is way away from where all the other letters are,
so it's unlikely to conflict with anything else that you plug into it. So i've set this to 'Z'.
In order to do that, if i just type in 'disk' and here should be a 'create and format hard disk',
so if i click on that, here you will see my one touch. It's a Seagate One Touch hard drive that
i've got set up here. So i've got a drive letter of 'Z'. Originally when i put that in, it was an
'E'. So to change it you right click here and you do 'change drive letter and path'. You
can then change it to whatever else you want to. So i've got it to 'Z' already,
but if you want to change it click on change and you can assign whatever letter you want here.
That means every time you plug it in it's going to be assigned that letter.
That's really critical to make sure that you can then use it on other devices so
set it to something like x y or z. Once you've done that we'll go back to this.
The easiest one to start with is probably blizzard battle.net,
and all we want to do here really is cut and paste the games folder from wherever it is at
the moment and paste it to the new folder and then tell blizzard that that's where it is.
So in order to do that you need to go to where the games are originally installed. If you don't know
where that is, on the top left go to blizzard and settings, and if you go to 'game settings',
it will now tell you the installation folder so you now want to go to that folder. If you've just
used the default settings your directory will probably say "C:\program files\black ops" or
something like. Go to that folder. I've already got this set up. So in my windows explorer here,
if i now go to that folder, what i would be doing if this was on my C drive, i would be cutting this
to my directory. So i've set up a folder called 'games' on my external hard drive which is 'Z',
and i've pasted it here. So when you go back to blizzard.net, when you say use different folder,
you would tell it the folder of wherever that new folder is. Select that folder, and that's
all set up and done! Rhe next time you play the game it will then use the directory in your new
drive and not on the c drive that you had it in originally. So that's blizzard all done!
So probably second easiest on the list is EA Origins, and here i would do two things.
One is i would set up the default folder so that it knows to install games to the new
drive you've got installed from now on, and the second thing is to move all the games that are on
the current hard drive to the new one. So to set the default folder, on the top left you want to go
to origins 'application settings' and there's an 'install and saves' option across the top.
Here you set your games library location. So again, similar to the battle.net, it would
probably be "c"\program files\origins" to start with. You want to change that to whatever your
folder is. So here it's "Z:\Games\Origin". So on the right you just change and select your folder
here. That's that one done. On the game itself you want to go to your game library and right-click
here. There's an option called 'move game'. Just select the folder that you want to move it to
and ea will move the game for you. So that will take a while because it's on two different drives
and it's got to copy it across, but once that's all done your game is the new drive and that's it!
So Epic Games is a little bit trickier here but you want to do something similar to what
you've done with the others. You want to copy the game library from the original
folder location to your new location. So that will be under "c:\program files\epic games"
if you're using the default path. I'll show you that here. Under my c drive and 'program files'
there will be an 'epic games' folder and here is 'fortnite'. What i'm going to do is
copy that to your z drive or wherever you want. So under my games i've got 'epic games', and i've got
'fortnite'. So i would copy it here. Once that's copied across what you now have to do is rename
it, which is what i've done here already. Renaming it is literally just put an underscore in front of
it. Just put something in front of it so that the epic games store doesn't recognize it.
Once you've done that, you then go back into epic games and you click on install. Now that is going
to ask you to choose a location. i actually want it to install on the z drive, so i've
got my 'Z:\games\epic games', which is a folder i showed you beforehand, and i'm going to click
on 'install'. What you then have to do is pause it when it's about 2%. So if i click on install now,
it's going to install. When it hits about 2%, i want to pause it, and
cancel it. Now if i go back to that folder that you saw, that fortnight folder is actually there
where it tried to install. So all you do is delete that and then you rename this
to the folder name that it should be. So now you've taken the full fortnight folder,
or any game for that matter, copied it from the c drive to the new location,
tricked epic games into starting the download so it knows the folder and
directory that it should be going to, and then just swapped the empty file,
because that's all it would be after a couple of percent, and swapped it for the full version.
The next time you then play that will then pick up the new version and you'll be good to go.
For Steam to use the new drive we need to add it as a destination folder for any future downloads
and then we need to move any current games to that new directory or new drive as well. So to
add a new folder destination we need to go up to the top left and select 'steam' and 'settings'.
Once you've done that, if we go to 'downloads' and there are 'steam library folders'. Click on that.
You can see i've already added one here. So the default was c:\program file\steam'. i've added
one already which is "Z:\games\steam". If you need to add another one you can just do 'add folder'
there and you can choose any drive you want, and then go and select that particular folder that you
want. Once you've added that you can then click on 'close' and 'OK'. Now we need to go and move
the actual game itself. All of your games you've got installed are on the left hand side here.
So if i click on 'Half-Life:Alyx' here and right-click on that, then go down to 'properties'.
Under properties you want to click on 'local files'. In your local files there's an option
called 'move install folder'. Click on 'move install folder'. i can choose where i want to move
it. now because i've only had two folders that we set up before which is the c drive and the z, and
it's already on c drive, it's giving me z drive as the only option. So i can move it to that,
click on move folder and it will move that game. When that's finished, and i click on play, it's
going to take it from that new folder rather than the original c drive. So that is steam all set up!
Last but not least we have the XBox game pass. Here we do something similar to what we did with
Steam previously. So we change or add the default location so all future games go to the new drive
and then we move the existing games to that new drive as well. To change the default drive,
on the top right. click on your icon which is your id and click on 'settings'. In settings, under
'general', there is an option to change where your apps are installed. Now with the windows game pass
you can't choose a directory, you just choose a drive. So it originally was on c drive for me and
i've switched it to 'Z', which is the new external drive. Change that. This means all future games
will go onto that drive. Close that, and that's that part done. Now for each game that you've
already got installed you now want to move that to the new drive. To do that you actually do that
from the app drawer. So if i click on the windows button on the keyboard and i type in 'apps',
i want to do 'add or remove programs'. So i'm actually going to move 'Control', which is one of
the games that you saw on the screen previously. If i scroll down here you will see 'Control'
is in my apps. Now there's a 'move' option. If i click on that it'll allow me to say what drive i
want to move it to. Now it's on c. i could move it to z. if i click on move, it will move that game.
That will take a little while. Once that's complete though the game will be moved to
your new drive. It's a little bit laborious, but it's the only way. I'd love it if there was a
bulk way of doing it but you kind of have to do it one at a time, but once you've done all that
it means all future games will go on your new drive, all your existing games will be
on your new drive. So now that all my games are now on my new hard drive i'm all set up!
For me, i got an external drive. So i got a Seagate One Touch 4TB one that's here,
and that's just plugged into a USB cable in the PC. it does mean slower start-up times. So a game
might take an extra 10 to 20 seconds longer because it's on an external hard drive, but
if you can wait that amount of time it's a really easy way to expand your storage without having to
open the side of this, put a new internal one in, plus if you selected the same drive letter on your
pc as you did on your laptop you can unplug this from your pc, plug it into your laptop, and the
laptop will recognize the games on there as well as the pc. So you're gonna have one drive with
all of your games on it and then you can swap and play between laptops and pcs or multiple pcs or
however you want to do. it's a really good way of only having to buy one drive for multiple devices.
Now what i will say the load times for this is slower. You could get an external SSD instead,
and do all of what i've just said on that, and then you'd have really fast
run times but then that's significantly more expensive than just getting that.
So it depends what you want. If you want the best of the best then you're probably just going to
plug an internal hard drive into here. If you want something that's
just a hair behind it i'd say an external SSD, but then that's going to cost quite a bit. If
you want to be a bit more budget conscious and don't mind waiting a little bit longer
for games to load then an external hard drive, for me, is the way to go, and that's what i got.
So i hope you enjoyed the video. i hope it was helpful and gave you some ideas to go and try.
if you did enjoy the video please don't forget to like and share it.
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