Moving data from one drive to another

[NatureBob]

So I'm running out of room on my 1TB hard drive and I wish to move all the data from that drive to a new 4TB drive.  The data that is on the 1TB drive I want to move is mostly just steam games and saves along with other programs.  My OS is on a different drive so I won't be moving that. Would I be able to copy and paste from the 1TB to the new drive or is there a different way of transferring without corrupting data?

 

Thank you. Please only respond if you know what you're talking about.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Moving Steam games is easy enough. Go to the Steam menu -> Settings -> Downloads and press the "STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS" and create a new library folder on the new drive. Then for all the games you want to move over, right click on them, select Properties -> Local Files tab -> "MOVE INSTALL FOLDER" button.

 

For other programs, you can reinstall them or move them to the new drive and create a symbolic link to it in the original location (see https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/)

 

For saves and settings, that all lives in your user folder. They also likely don't take up much space to be worth moving around and moving the user folder contents around has the issue of if you screw it up, there's no way to undo it.

[NatureBob]

Thanks so much! You answered my question perfectly 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, NatureBob said:

Thanks so much! You answered my question perfectly 

You're welcome.

 

If you're really curious about your saves though, they live mostly in C:\Users\[username]\My Documents or C:\Uses\[username]\AppData. The problem is games and apps expect the files to live here so that's also another reason why moving them isn't worth while. It'll just be symlinks on symlinks