How to Move Steam Games to Another Drive Without Downloading Them Again

To move a Steam game to another drive, add that drive as a Steam Library folder under Settings > Storage, select the drive the game is on, tick the game and click Move. Steam copies the files for you, so there is nothing to redownload. The whole job usually takes as long as your slower drive needs to copy the data, and the steps below also cover what to do when the destination drive does not appear or the move fails.

Storage is the most predictable problem in PC gaming. A handful of modern releases can eat a whole SSD, and sooner or later you buy a second drive or need to free up the one that holds Windows. The instinct is often to uninstall and start again, which on a slow connection can mean days of waiting and a serious chunk of a data cap. Steam has had a better way built in for years. This guide explains how the move works, how to choose what to put on which drive, how to fix the common errors, and how to handle the bigger job of moving the whole Steam installation.

Key facts

• Steam can move an installed game between library folders on the same computer using its built-in Move feature, under Settings > Storage.
• You must add the destination as a Steam Library first by using the "+" control at the top of the Storage page.
• Moving a game does not require a redownload, although a pending game update may still need to run afterward.
• Valve does not recommend installing Steam itself on an external hard drive because of potential performance issues.
• Games on an external drive are a different matter from the Steam program, and a fast USB SSD can work well for many titles.
• If you move the whole Steam folder, Valve says to keep steamapps, userdata and steam.exe, then verify your games afterward.
• Saves stored outside Steam, often in Documents\My Games, are not protected by a library move, so check them separately.

Before you start: three quick checks

A little preparation prevents most failed moves.

Check free space on the destination. You need room for the game's full installed size, plus some breathing space for future patches. Filling a drive to the last gigabyte is a good way to create new errors later. As a rule of thumb, try to leave around 10 to 15 percent of a drive free, since a very full drive can slow down and cause problems when games patch.

Finish or pause downloads and close the game. A game that is running, updating or being validated can block the move. Quit it completely and check the Downloads page in Steam for anything in progress.

Back up saves for games you care about. Moving the install folder normally leaves your saves alone, because most are stored somewhere else. Still, if a game keeps its saves inside its own install folder, an interrupted move could put them at risk. Our guide to Steam Cloud conflicts and save backups shows you where to look.

Step by step: moving one game or several

1. Add the new drive as a Steam Library. Open Steam, go to the Steam menu at the top left and choose Settings, then open the Storage tab. You will see a dropdown of the drives Steam already knows about. Use the "+" button or the Add Drive option in that dropdown, pick the new drive and confirm. Steam creates a folder there for its files.

2. Select the source drive. In the same Storage screen, use the dropdown to pick the drive where the game currently lives. Steam displays a bar showing what is used and a list of installed games with their sizes.

3. Tick the games you want to move. You can select several at once, which is handy when you are clearing out a whole drive. Sort the list by size to find the biggest wins quickly.

4. Click Move. A dialog asks where to send them. Pick your new library and confirm.

5. Wait for it to finish. You can watch the progress. When it is done, the game launches from the new location as normal. Your library looks exactly the same, and Steam tracks where everything is.

There is also a shortcut for single games. Right-click the game in your library, choose Properties, open the Installed Files tab, and use the option to move the install folder. Both routes do the same job, so use whichever you find easier. Valve may adjust menu names between client updates, so if a label looks slightly different, look for similar wording in the same area.

How long will the move take?

Move time depends almost entirely on the slowest drive involved and on the shape of the game's data. A game made of a small number of huge archive files will move faster than one made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny files, even at the same total size.

These are rough, typical sustained speeds, so treat them as a way to estimate rather than as exact figures:

Real results can be noticeably slower, particularly with hard drives handling many small files or with a USB port that is running at an older standard. If a move seems frozen, watch the drive activity in Task Manager before you assume it has failed. A long pause on a hard drive may just be a large batch of small files.

Which games belong on which drive?

Not everything needs your fastest storage. Sorting games sensibly gets you much more out of a limited SSD.

Some recent games list an SSD as a requirement rather than a suggestion, and running them on a hard drive can produce texture pop-in and long stalls. Check the system requirements on the store page before you demote a game to slower storage. When you do have a spare hard drive, it makes a great parking place: moving a game you have paused for a few months costs far less time than redownloading it later.

Fixing "the destination drive is not showing"

If your new drive is missing from Steam's list, work through these in order.

Confirm Windows can see the drive. Open File Explorer and look for it. If it is not listed, press Windows and X, open Disk Management, and look for your disk. A brand-new drive often appears as "Not Initialized" or "Unallocated". Initialize it, create a new simple volume and assign a drive letter. Note that formatting erases a disk, so only do this on an empty one.

Check the file system. On Windows, NTFS is the safe choice for a Steam library. Drives bought for use with consoles or cameras are often formatted differently. Formatting a drive to NTFS will wipe what is on it, so copy off anything important first.

Avoid network drives and unusual locations. Steam libraries are meant for local drives. A network share may not behave properly, and the "Add Drive" list may not offer it at all.

Restart Steam. If you plugged the drive in while Steam was running, close Steam fully from the system tray and open it again so that it rescans your storage.

Check external drive connections. Use a port directly on the PC rather than a hub, and make sure the drive has enough power. If a USB drive keeps dropping off during a move, the cable or the enclosure is a likely culprit.

Fixing "folder already exists" and libraries that will not add

This message usually appears because the drive already contains a Steam library folder from an earlier install, or from a previous Windows setup. Steam does not want to make a second one on top of it.

Try these approaches:

1. Open the drive in File Explorer and look for a folder called SteamLibrary or Steam.
2. If it contains a steamapps folder holding games you want, do not delete it. In Steam's Storage page, try adding the drive again. Many times it is simply a case of pointing Steam at the existing library.
3. If Steam still refuses, rename the old folder, add a fresh library, and then move the old game folders into the new library's steamapps\common folder with Steam closed. Launch Steam afterward. You may need to start the install of a game so that Steam discovers the existing files and validates them.
4. If the old folder is junk and you are certain that nothing in it matters, delete it and add the drive again.

Take a moment before deleting. People have wiped hundreds of gigabytes of perfectly good games thinking it was leftover clutter.

Fixing moves that fail partway through

A move can stop with a disk write error, an access-denied message, or a vague failure. Here is what usually helps.

Restart Steam and your computer. Valve notes that a restart releases locks on files and other resources, and this alone clears many failures.

Check that the destination is writable. Library folders must be writable for updates to work, and Valve says these permissions can break and need refreshing. In the Storage page, look under the three-dot menu next to the drive for a repair option and run it.

Run a drive check. Valve says disk errors are generally caused by problems with the drive itself, such as bad sectors or a drive that is starting to fail. On Windows, right-click the drive, open Properties, go to Tools and run error checking. If a drive shows repeated errors, stop trusting it and copy what matters off it as soon as you can.

Look at your antivirus. Security software that scans every file as it is written can slow a move right down or interfere with it. Valve frequently points to antivirus as a cause of file trouble. Add your library folders as exclusions rather than switching protection off altogether.

Move one game at a time. When a batch fails, a single game is often the problem. Moving them one by one tells you which game to verify or reinstall.

After any failed move, verify the game before playing. Right-click it, choose Properties, open Installed Files, and click the button to verify the integrity of game files. Do not panic if one or more files are reported as failing verification. Valve says this is normal for most games, because those are local configuration files that should not be replaced. If verification finishes and the game launches, you are done.

"Update required" after moving a game

Sometimes a game asks for an update immediately after a move. This usually has nothing to do with the move itself. Either an update was already waiting, or Steam is doing some checking.

Open the Downloads page to see what is queued. Small updates are normal. If Steam appears to want to download the entire game, stop and investigate before you burn through your data:

• Make sure Steam is looking at the correct library. Check which drive it believes the game is on.
• Restart Steam so that it rescans your libraries.
• Verify the integrity of the game files. This compares what is on disk and only fetches what is actually missing or damaged.

If you specifically want to play right now without an update, your options are limited, since online games generally require the latest version. For single-player games you could try launching in Offline Mode, as long as your account is set up for that and Steam has not already flagged the game as needing an update.

Moving games to an external drive

You can create a library on a USB drive in exactly the same way. Just be clear about the distinction: Valve advises against installing the Steam program on an external hard drive because of possible performance issues, but storing some games on a separate library is a common and practical workaround.

Keep the following in mind if you go this route:

• A USB SSD is far better suited to this than a portable hard drive.
• Plug it into the fastest port you have. Older USB ports can seriously limit speed.
• Always close games and quit Steam before you unplug the drive. Pulling the cable out mid-write is one of the easiest ways to corrupt a library.
• Do not expect to plug it into any random computer and immediately play. On another PC you would need to be signed in, and that PC needs to recognize the library. Games are also licensed to your account, so this is not a way of sharing them.
• If you want to give someone access to your games, Valve's official route is Steam Families, which we explain in our Steam Families guide.

Moving the entire Steam installation

Most people only need to move games. But if you are retiring a drive or replacing the disk that holds Steam itself, Valve documents a process for moving the entire folder.

Before you begin, make sure that you know your Steam login name and password, and that your account's email address is current so that you can reset your password if necessary. Valve also strongly recommends backing up your steamapps folder, because if something goes wrong and you have no backup, you will need to reinstall your games one by one.

The simple method, according to Valve:

1. Exit the Steam client completely.
2. Open your Steam folder. By default this is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\.
3. Delete all the files and folders there except the steamapps and userdata folders and steam.exe.
4. Cut and paste the whole Steam folder to the new location, such as D:\Games\Steam\.
5. Launch Steam from there and log in. It will briefly update.
6. Verify the integrity of the game files for your installed games.

Future game downloads will go into the new steamapps folder.

If that runs into errors, Valve describes a more thorough route. Move the steamapps folder to your desktop, uninstall Steam so that its old settings are removed from the Windows Registry, reinstall Steam in the location you want, and then move steamapps back in. Log in and verify your games. Be sure that steamapps is safely out of the way before you uninstall, since an uninstall can remove what is inside the Steam folder.

A warning about saves. Valve notes that third-party games not using Steam Cloud usually keep saves in C:\Users\[your name]\Documents\My Games\. If you are changing to a new drive or a new Windows install, move that folder too. If a game is not there, the developer can tell you where its saves live, since each developer chooses its own location.

Moving to a new PC: the fastest approach

Moving between two computers is not what the Move feature is for, because it only works between folders on the same machine. You have a few choices.

If you copy game folders by hand, place them in the steamapps\common folder of a library on the new PC, begin the install in Steam, and let it discover and verify the files. Steam should then only fetch whatever differs. Newer versions of Steam also include a feature for transferring games between computers on a local network, which you can find in the Downloads section of the settings, if it is available on your client.

How to free up space without moving anything

Before you move anything, check whether you can simply reclaim some space.

• Sort by size in the Storage page and see what is actually taking up the room. A game you finished a year ago might be using 150 GB.
• Uninstall what you no longer play. You still own it, and it can be reinstalled at any time. Your cloud-saved progress remains available for games that support cloud saves.
• Remove optional high-resolution texture packs. Some large games list these as free DLC. You can often untick them in the game's properties to save tens of gigabytes.
• Clear your download cache if downloads have been misbehaving. It is under Settings > Downloads. It will not affect your installed games, but you will have to sign in again afterward.
• Use Windows Storage Sense to clear temporary files on your system drive.

Pre-loading a big release on a nearly full SSD is a common way to run out of space. Clearing out a game or two ahead of time avoids a stressful last-minute shuffle on launch day.

Getting more out of your budget

A new SSD and a growing library both cost money, so it helps to fund the hobby in smarter ways. Our guide to the cheapest ways to buy Steam games covers sale timing and wishlist tactics, and we track Steam's sale dates so you can plan purchases around them.

If you have spare time rather than spare cash, XPReward lets you complete offers for points and redeem them for gift cards. You can create a free account and see which offers are available in your country, although availability varies a lot from place to place, and $25 of Steam credit takes 3,600 points to reach.

Frequently asked questions

Can I move Steam games to another drive without redownloading?

Yes. Add the new drive as a library in Settings > Storage, select your game and click Move. Steam copies the existing files, so no full download is needed, though any pending game update may still install afterward.

Why is my new drive not showing in Steam?

Windows may not have initialized or assigned a letter to it, or Steam may have been running when you connected it. Check File Explorer and Disk Management first, then fully exit and reopen Steam. If the disk is empty, format it as NTFS.

What does "folder already exists" mean when adding a Steam library?

The drive most likely already has a library folder from an earlier install. Look for SteamLibrary or Steam on that drive. Keep it if it contains games you want. Rename it or delete it only once you are sure of what is inside.

Will moving a Steam game delete my saves?

Normally no, because most saves are stored in your userdata, Documents or AppData folders and not with the game. A few games do keep saves inside the install folder, so back up anything important before you move one.

Can I run Steam games from an external hard drive?

Yes, you can create a library on one, and a USB SSD works much better than a portable hard drive. Valve does not recommend installing the Steam program itself on an external drive, due to potential performance issues. Keep Steam on an internal drive.

Why does Steam want to update a game after I moved it?

An update was probably already waiting. If Steam appears to be downloading the entire game, check that it is looking at the correct library, restart it, then verify the game files. Verification only replaces what is missing or damaged.

How do I move my whole Steam folder to a new drive?

Valve's method is to exit Steam, delete everything except steamapps, userdata and steam.exe, cut and paste the folder to the new location, then launch Steam and verify your games. Back up steamapps before you start.

Is it okay to move games while another game is running?

It is better not to. Close your games and pause downloads first, since running or updating games can block the move and heavy disk activity will slow it down.

Sources

• Steam Support: Moving a Steam Installation and Games, for the Storage settings steps and the full installation move.
• Steam Support: Verify Integrity of Game Files, for the verification process and what failed files mean.
• Steam Support, Valve's knowledge base on disk errors and download cache behavior.

Speed figures in the table are typical estimates and will vary by hardware. Steam steps checked on 8 November 2026.