How To Move Steam Games

Guide on how to move your steam games between drives or between computers

Stop Manually Moving Games

This guide is to help people CORRECTLY move games on Steam. This is due to the massive amounts of bad and outdated information that exists. These are the only officially supported ways of moving games. If you do anything else, you risk corruption or steam not seeing the game as installed.

Moving Games To A Different Drive On The Same Computer

This is when you want to move a game you have installed to a different drive on the SAME computer. You might want to move a game off of your SSD onto a slower spinning hard drive to save space. Or move a game onto an SSD to make load times better.

• Steam -> Settings
  
• Click Storage along the left
  
• Find the drive where your game or games you want to move are installed
  
• Click the check box beside each game you want to move. You can check off multiple games to move. Note that ctrl-click/shift-click doesn't work here so you will have to click each one manually.
  
• Click "Move" in the lower right
  
  
• In the pulldown select the destination drive you want to move the games to
  
• Click "Move"
  
  

Steam will begin moving your games now. This can take time depending on the target and destination drive speeds

Moving Games Between Computers On The Same Network

Updated as of February 22, 2023

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE43

As long as both computers are on the same network you can install games from the other computer and not use your internet bandwidth

Please refer to the FAQ above with regards to other limitations

• Ensure one computer has the game you want already installed on it with Steam running
  
• Check your steam settings in Steam->Settings->Downloads->Game File Transfers over Local Network
  
• Ensure this set appropriately on both computers
  
  
  
• On the target computer find the game you want to install
  
• If you have "Remote Play" enabled on the host computer you need to click the down arrow button beside "stream"
  
• Click "Install"
  
• If the transfer is happening across your local network a blue banner will show up in the "Downloads" queue letting you know what computer the install is happening from

Move Entire Steam Library Folder Location Between Computers

This section only applies to Steam library folder locations not where Steam is installed on c:\program files

This is only for the wholesale move of all games in a Steam library folder location. This is more a scenario for when you rebuild a computer and want to move your D: E: etc drives

• Move the entire physical drive
  
• Alternatively you can move the library folder. By default steam installs games in <drive letter>:\SteamLibrary. Move the ENTIRE SteamLibrary folder to the new location
  
• On the new computer go to Steam -> Settings -> Storage
  
• In the Storage Manager along the top click the "+". you might need to manually scroll to the right if you already have many existing libraries
  
• Select the pulldown for "let me choose another location"
  
• Click Add
  
• Select the folder where your "SteamLibrary" above was copied to
  
• Click Select

You've now successfully moved an entire steam library folder to your new computer. All your games will be automatically seen as installed. Games may be queued to be updated depending on when you moved the library.

Moving Individual Games Between Computers

THIS IS WHERE MOST PEOPLE SCREW UP

If you want to move individual games from one computer to another this is the ONLY supported way of doing so. DO NOT manually move files around. DO NOT copy the 'steamapps' folder or whatever nonsense that web page from 10 years ago says.

On the Source Computer

• Right click ->Properties on the game you want to backup
  
• Click "Installed Files" on the left
  
• Click "Backup game files"
  
• Select the directory you want to save the backup to
  
• Click Create Backup
  
• In that location will be a folder with the name of the game

On the Target Computer

• Steam -> Restore Game Backup
  
• Browse to the folder with the name of the game of the backup you created previously
  
• click Restore Backup
  
• Select which library location you want to install the game to
  
• Click Install

[Tom Cruise]

Ok thank you

[Satoru]

Note that the steam client itself wont eraelly work as it requires you to install steam properly

You can install steam on the new computer on a different drive, then point the newly installed steam to add the library of the steam on the drive you're migrating

[Tom Cruise]

Hi, I have a question, I have my ENTIRE steam downloaded on a m2 SSD, this ssd does not have my OS on it’s just steam, can I transfer my SSD from a computer to another and will it work ?

[Kipas]

i just use SATA SSD's like externals drives

[Satoru]

Note that steam doesn't officially support external drives due to various factors

However you would just plug in the external drive to a new computer, and just point to the directory where you installed the games. Its no different than pointing to the folder on a normal internal drive

[Jethro25]

hey
if I had moved my steam games on to an external hard drive (using the storage setting on steam). I no longer have access to the old computer. is it possible to recover those steam games with the files I have now or am I screwed?

[Satoru]

Note “I want my games here” is again using directories as a library sorting system. Steam is your Steam library sorting mechanism. That’s the entire point of a library mechanism

[jnpl95]

"Steam manages your library, there's no need for folder structures"
I like to have all my installed games (Emulator Games, Steam Games, Epic Games, random github games) in C:\Games.

If you don't like it, that's fine, but that's not the case for everyone. It's about flexibility, and it's unfortunate that we have to use workarounds to move games into a new steam game library on the same drive to move the games to C:\Games.

[Strategy Informer]

SATA SSD on the old computer M.2 on the new computer dont want to install the SATA into the new computer.

[Satoru]

Why would you want to move that many games onto c: rather than mounting the d: directly