Transferring Game Client Games to a New Drive
Note: This information was taken ENTIRELY from a VERY helpful post by Zingu found HERE. I lay no claim to this wisdom. Also, itās highly possible that thereās another (maybe even better) way to this (which Zingu acknowledges) but I can confirm that this method works as it helped me. Iām putting it up here to help others, especially now that Desuraās owner has apparently declared bankruptcy. Note that theyāve made a public statement refuting the idea that the Desura service will go offline, but that doesnāt stop those of us who have concerns and want to keep those DRM-free games on a separate hard drive - for storage, just in case.
So whatās the objective here?
Game Clients (also calledĀ Internet-based digital distribution platforms, but yikes thatās a lot of words) like Desura sometimes automatically install to one drive and will not (easily) support changing that at a later time. Other clients may let you change the drive at any time, but itās more difficult to sync data for all games, can be tedious to find it, etc. So basically, youāre installing to one drive (or already installed) and you want those games to be stored on a different drive (without uninstalling the client and games and etc etc etc).
There's a way!
You can use symlinks in both steam and desura to move part of the games or whole ones over to the SSD if you want better loading times in some game. Note: There might be some GUI program or something to make it easier but this is rather straight forward and has proven effective. Here's an example using Desura as the game client.
1. Create a new Desura directory on the target drive. Note you can even skip this step. I created a folder on my D drive for this example. "D:\Games\Desura" 2. Move or copy the folders "Common" and "Cache" in your current Desura folder. In my case this was "C:\Games\Desura" to the target drive, in the Desura folder you created in step 1. (In my case "D:\Games\Desura") 2.1If you didn't move the "Common" and "Cache" folders, then delete or rename them now. 3.Open a command prompt with administrative privileges. (to do this, use the win button, type cmd, right click the program and choose to run as admin) 4.Go to Desura folder. (In other words, type "cd C:\Games\Desura" and press enter) 5.Type "mklink /D Cache (and link to where you moved/copied the folder)" In my case "mklink /D Cache D:\Games\Desura\Cache" 6. Do the same for the "Common" folder, in my case "mklink /D Common D:\Games\Desura\Common"
Then Desura should store everything but the client itself on the new drive. Installing new games and uninstalling old ones do work.
