Bought a new SSD, or your main drive is full? You don’t have to uninstall a Steam game and download it again to put it somewhere else. Steam has a built-in Move option that moves the installed files to another drive. This guide covers that, plus how to move the whole Steam installation.

This guide is part of our PC game troubleshooting guide.

Step 1: Add a Steam Library folder on the new drive

Steam can only move a game to a Steam Library folder, so create one on the new drive first. Valve’s steps:

  1. In Steam, open the Steam menu and choose Settings.
  2. Select the Storage tab.
  3. Here you can see your default installation drive. Click the + button at the top to add a new Steam Library folder, and choose the new drive.

Once the folder exists, you can choose it when you install new games too.

By default, Steam installs games to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\.

Step 2: Move the games

  1. Open Settings > Storage again.
  2. Select the drive where the games you want to move are installed.
  3. Select the games you want to move.
  4. Click Move and choose the new Steam Library folder.

Steam moves the installed files to the new folder. Large games take a while, especially from a hard drive, so let it finish before you launch anything.

Which games should go on the fastest drive?

If your drives are different speeds, put the games you play most and the ones with the longest loading screens on your fastest SSD. Games you rarely play can sit on a slower or larger drive and be moved back when you need them.

For help choosing a drive, see our guides to the best NVMe SSDs for gaming and the best external SSDs.

Moving the whole Steam installation

Moving Steam itself, rather than just games, is a manual process. Before you start, Valve says to:

  • Back up your steamapps folder. If something goes wrong and there’s no backup, you’ll have to reinstall your games one by one.
  • Make sure you know your Steam login and password, and that your account has your current email address, in case you need to reset the password.

Valve also doesn’t recommend installing Steam on an external hard drive, because of potential performance issues.

Valve’s simple method:

  1. Exit Steam completely.
  2. Open the Steam installation folder. The default is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\.
  3. Delete everything in it except the steamapps and userdata folders and steam.exe.
  4. Cut and paste the whole Steam folder to the new location, for example D:\Games\Steam\.
  5. Start Steam from the new location and log in. Steam updates briefly.
  6. Verify the integrity of your game files for installed games.

If you get errors, Valve’s fallback is to move the steamapps folder to your desktop, uninstall Steam, reinstall it to the new location, and put steamapps back inside the new Steam folder before verifying your games.

Don’t forget saves that aren’t in Steam Cloud

Valve’s guide singles out saves for games that don’t use Steam Cloud. Many of these keep saves in Documents\My Games\, and each developer can choose its own location. If you’re moving to a new drive or a new PC, copy that folder too.

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