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Rizz Apr 12, 2023 @ 7:15am
Recent game updates lead to auto transferring games to another drive
As the title says, for the past 3 days, games that are 70+ GB in size that receive updates, will download those updates onto a different drive than they are installed in, then move the entire game to another drive.

I had an update for New World today, only 200MB, the game was installed on G: (over 150GB remains free on this drive, and it's healthy)

It instead downloaded the update to H: which is an external drive I only use for storing games I don't actively play anymore, and it then proceeded to transfer all game files to this drive.

My question is why? this also happened with Cyberpunk 2077 and The Last of Us Part 1 a few days ago, and my only option is to stop the installation and uninstall, then reinstall the entire game to the original drive.
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Originally posted by wuddih:
Steam did not move the game, all you saw were temporary files due to lack of storage space on the drive where the game is installed on.

for updates, Steam needs space to store compressed downloaded files, space to store the uncompressed files afterwards, space for files to patch and that all before then the files are moved to their final location.
mainly depends on game and double the size of the entire game is sometimes not enough.
first download aka install does not need the patching part so that requires less free space.
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Maria Apr 12, 2023 @ 7:29am 
I'm guessing that the 200 MB patch was their compressed size. When it was extracted, the size was more than your available storage drive. Also, in the process of updating software/games, it is often there is so much compression/extraction going on in the background so you would need to have more than the actual patch size/your software/game size available in your storage drive.

Another possibility is that the devs might be using an inefficient process of patching their new update. Perhaps Steam realized this and decided to use your other disk with much more space left to avoid a bigger problem.
Last edited by Maria; Apr 12, 2023 @ 8:09am
#1
Muppet among Puppets Apr 12, 2023 @ 7:36am 
If the game actually was moved in the end to another drive automatically, contact support about this.
#2
The author of this thread has indicated that this post answers the original topic.
wuddih Apr 12, 2023 @ 9:18am 
Steam did not move the game, all you saw were temporary files due to lack of storage space on the drive where the game is installed on.

for updates, Steam needs space to store compressed downloaded files, space to store the uncompressed files afterwards, space for files to patch and that all before then the files are moved to their final location.
mainly depends on game and double the size of the entire game is sometimes not enough.
first download aka install does not need the patching part so that requires less free space.
#3
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Date Posted: Apr 12, 2023 @ 7:15am
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