Oi Mates,

I got me some new 1TB SSD, because my hatred for EA had bloated to the point that it was beginning to fill up all my space. So now I wonder, does Galaxy have a feature that will move my entire library with all saves and such from one drive to another?

After five minutes of looking for the feature I thought I might as well just try my luck and ask you guys and maybe enjoy some of your trolling. I love you, c'mere you little buggers, y'all gettin internet hugs!

edit: sorry for the typo in the title, forum won't let me correct that.

You know of cloning, right? It copies the content exactly, including all viruses and stuff. Remember that the destination disk MUST BE EMPTY and big enough to hold everything from the source.

Well, the setup I got was that the dude who built my machine only installed one partition, which is C\. Now I know that is not how it is supposed to be, but I now have everything on my system partition, so I hoped that galaxy would allow me to move at least my games onto a separate partition.

The 'import' function did not work, btw, I tried and tested that one after setting the ne default directory to the new drive. When I chose a folder with a game inside, it just says "No game found".

Manually move the games across, then tell Galaxy to use that folder..

Yes, it really is that simple.

Saves vary depending on where they are placed, saves in anything other than the actual game folder will remain where they are.

As for partitions, it's a cheap idea to organise your files a bit when you have only one drive, or when you need to backup quickly for a format.

But to be fair, partitioning your drive isn't a great idea, as if your drive goes, the lot goes, regardless of partition, so there is little benefit to it.

I just decided that based on the fact that the launcher is named galaxy and galaxies tend to have at least one super massive black hole, probably even an entire cluster of black holes, within their centres and that these black holes sound like very dangerous things...

...I just took my enire games folder and moved it over to the new drive and then I shall import it, once the transfer is complete. The launcher will remain on C\, but the games and future dowloads will be on E\.

Wish me luck. Yup, I did as you said. Or rather I am doing as you said. Because this takes while. I thought SSDs were supposed to be fast, but then gain, 10 Minutes for 200 GB sounds okay.

Well thats what you do.


If i format my Windows and reinstall, it's the same approach.

The only thing you have to watch out for is the save files, are some are in Appdata, others in My Documents and some actually in the game folder.

Considering how simple it would be for devs to put save files into a single common folder, i don't see why they have to be absolute cunts and put them all over the fucking place. /rant. Depends on the read speed of your HDD, and the Sata version you are using.

I think this goes back to the famous question of evil by epicurus and the short answer to a long debate is: What is the point of joy in gaming, if you do not have the suffering of technical nonsense to contrast it.



EDIT
Using the 6GB/S cables, the new Disk I am using is Crucial BX500 CT960BX500SSD1(Z) 960GB Internes SSD (3D NAND, SATA, 2, 5-Zoll),
which you find here: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07KL82RLL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The old disk is: WDC WDS500G 1B0B-00AS40,
which you can find here: https://www.amazon.de/Festplatte-Multitasking-ressourcenintensive-Anwendungen-WDS500G1B0A/dp/B01LXPD2WB

Just because I kno you are curious. And if any of you are so inclined, please tell me if that speed is too slow and something is wrong. Then again, games consist of hundreds of thousands of small files, which lessens writíng speed.

Indeed, but just to be clear;

If you format Windows at all, your saves will be located in;


C:\Users\*InsertUsername*\AppData

And one of those folders, usually local/locallow


C:\Users\*InsertUsername*\Documents


OR, they can be in the actual game folders, and those you can leave aslong as you keep the games installed on their own drive and you don't format it.

The older games tend to be in the game folders, the newer ones tend to be all over the place for reasons unknown, despite how stupid it is.

Thank you for your answer. I edited my reply into my previous post because I did not think you would be so fast in responding, so please look to the edit above.

Also, I do not intend to wipe my system drive, so I may have to gather my saves from all over the place, butI will not lose them.

That's over 300MB/s. Looks ok to me.

It's probably about right, it does sound a bit slow, but with the numerous smaller files it could be just that, i don't have the drive space to test on my own. Someone else maybe able to confirm it though if they have the drive space to test.


As for the saves, just make sure you remember which folders they go back into, it makes it easier!

Thank you guys for yur advice. I will now begin gathering up may saves.

If I was truly worried about my drive speed, I could just run a diagnostics program instead of bugging you guys about it. :)

Cheers and thanks!

There are several potential ways to do this, both software specific and software agnostic. If a program has a feature to do it for you, that might be an easy fast way to do it, but if not it may have a way to change what directory it uses for a given purpose (installations, plugins, data, projects etc.). I the case of Galaxy it lets you choose where your games get installed to so this is possible however you have to actually copy the entire directory tree of games to the new drive yourself manually, then reconfigure it to point to that directory and then delete the originals once you're sure everything worked out ok.

If Galaxy or any other program for that matter does not have a reconfigurable directory like this for any aspect of where they install things too or look for data, you can work around the problem using some advanced Windows features without the program needing to do anything special. The primary Windows feature we would use for this is called a junction point, which is an advanced administration feature of the filesystem which lets you create what appears to be a directory, but is actually a pointer to data stored in another directory which can be on a different partition if desired. Microsoft does not provide an easy way in the GUI file manager to create junction points so it is somewhat of a hidden feature of Windows as far as the average user is concerned.

The easiest way to create junction points in Windows is to search Google for a Windows Explorer addon called "Link Shell Extension" and install that. It adds new right click options to Windows Explorer/File Explorer which let you set the source you want to make available in another location on your system, then go to the destination and create a junction point pointing to that source (other options like symlinks and hard links are available also).

This will allow you to move any directory from any program to another hard disk partition if desired without the program having to be aware you're doing it or have any special support. It's done at the Windows filesystem level with wizardry. :)

1. Make sure the programs that access the files are not running. Close all apps that use the directory you want to move.

2. Move the directory to the desired location on a different drive or wherever.

3. Using Link Shell Extension (or any other software that can do this including Microsoft commandline utilities etc.), select the new directory you moved things to as the "source".

4. Go back to the old directory where the files used to be and right click and create a junction point which will now point to the new location.

So lets say the original directory was: C:\SomeProgram\data and you want to move that to D:\SomeProgram\data

Exit the programs that use this data first, then move C:\SomeProgram\data to D:\SomeProgram\data then right click on D:\SomeProgram\data and choose "Pick Link Source" from Link Shell Extension, then go into the C:\SomeProgram directory and right click and choose "Drop as ... -> Junction" from Link shell extension. A new directory called "data" shows up where it was originally, but it is actually a junction point and not a directory. It automatically points to the new location on D: now and the program will still access this data from C: but it is magically redirected by Windows to D: behind the scenes thanks to the junction point.

This is a pretty powerful feature that not many people know about (unless they're an advanced user or MCSE or whatever), but it is very useful to know about and can save a lot of headaches so I thought I'd spend a bit of time to share it in hopes it helps someone else to solve similar problems in the future.

Hope you all may find this useful!

Take care.

I was in a similar situation not too long ago. I just installed a new SSD and wanted to switch my library over. I didn't run into any issues manually moving my games EXCEPT for Fallout: NV, which was heavily modded. It was a bit of a disaster that I eventually gave up on and just uninstalled and deleted all my mods.

I dunno but I couldn't wrap my head around the amount of work/effort needed to move even the few hundred GB I have of game installers/folders/saves that I have. Best of luck to you regardless. One would think at this point we'd have tech to clone smaller HDDs to/as partitions on larger HDDs WITHOUT wiping the entire destination drive. :\Just remember that SSDs can and will lose data if left unpowered for too long(I think it's like weeks or months, though).