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I have a Lenovo u410 laptop. My recent install broke, so I reinstalled with 13.04 daily. It's on a 30GB primary SSD, and I want to offload large files to the 1TB hard drive that also resides in my system.

I installed steam and it defaulted to my SSD as expected. Is there anything special I would have to add to the fstab for my second ext3 HDD? Is this as simple as symlinking to a directory on the hard disk?

Conclusion:

I mounted my hard drive disk as /home in fstab. Since it's now ext4 steam installs games and dependencies there by default.

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4 Answers 4

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You can choose another drive directly in Steam. But than you have to choose this drive at every Download.

To change the default Download folder,

Just quit Steam (important!) and move the entire Steam folder to another location

mv ~/.local/share/Steam /new/path

and start Steam again. It says something like "can't find Steam, did you move it?" and than you can choose the new folder location.

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  • I encountered this due to running out of space on the mounted partition. I had to manually kill processes then created a symlink to the new target directory. Aug 23, 2022 at 15:30
  • I did mv /home/username/.local/share/Steam /Steam, since the root partition had the most free space between all other partitions and was the only one that could not be resized to become smaller. Just needed to change the ownership from 'root' to 'username': askubuntu.com/questions/6723/… . Sep 19, 2023 at 2:42
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When you click on a game to install it on the first window that pops up there will be a drop down menu. On here you have a choice to install on the default directory or to create a new library.


Install dialog

When you choose to install in a new directory you will get a choice of where to install.

Choose a directory

I hope this helps.

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  • Will this install all the dependencies for the game in that new location, ie. the larger harddisk? I because the solid state has size constraints.
    – mikeymop
    Feb 23, 2013 at 17:25
  • This will install the game files to a different directory while steam will remain where it is currently installed, so everything that is needed for the game will be located there. It is like changing the install location on Windows.
    – CMDann
    Feb 23, 2013 at 17:30
  • This should clarify that it's NOT just a different folder. It HAS to be on a different drive. Kinda sucks for people like me that want to move to a different folder on the same drive.
    – Saturn K
    Nov 16, 2018 at 3:27
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  1. Go to the "Steam" menu and select "Settings"
  2. Click "Downloads" on the left and press the "Steam Library Folders" button
  3. Press the "Add Library Folder" button and select a new directory
  4. Right click on the new entry and select "Make Default Folder" from the context menu

All new installations will default to the new location.

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And if you want to make these libraries before installing the game, see my answer to this question Not enough space on hard drive for tf2

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