Is there a way to change which drive Steam downloads a game to?

[Gordon Cameron]

I just installed a secondary drive as my main one is almost out of room. I wanted to download some of my Steam games now that I have the space (Half Life 1&2 etc.), but don't see any setting that would allow me to alter the target directory. When I start to redownload the game, it just gets going without letting me pick the location. Anyone know how to change this?

[Fugitive]

Everything goes to the same spot and there's no way to override it, and it's one of the more common complaints people still have about Steam.

However, you can just reinstall Steam on the secondary drive and move anything you already have installed under the 'steamapps' directory over without having to redownload it all. You just can't split things between drives.

[Gordon Cameron]

Ok, I did that. Thanks for the tip.

[malkav11]

This is why I generally only have a couple of Steam games installed at any given moment. More choice over install location is good, Valve. Some of us have multiple drives.

[Bad Neighbor]

I was perusing my steam folder the other day and learned the ungodly truth about where all my hard drive space had gone. Steam needs to improve their uninstall process. Bad.

Also, why the duplicate files for media?

[rei]

My Steam folder is 50 gigs :/

I've backed up the entire Steamapps folder and then deleted the whole thing when I do my backups...and copy it back over after a restore. I should backup/uninstall them individually inside steam.

Be warned: selecting more than 1 at a time may result in restores that don't always work and they make you redownload it anyways.

[Gordon Cameron]

Well, the move seemed to work fine, but today there was a Steam update, and later almost all my games (except for some reason Half Life 2) were gone. I have to redownload all of them, and who knows if my save games are still around. (Probably not, and wham goes my motivation to keep playing Bioshock.)

This is incredibly annoying... anyone heard of anything like this? Basically I've lost all faith in Steam and am extremely leery of buying any more games with it, if they are going to get nuked everytime there's an update.

[Fugitive]

That's definitely unusual, and I've never heard of it happening to anyone else. Is everything still there in the steamapps directory?

And your Bioshock saves should be fine, since they go under your user directory, not Steam's.

[Gordon Cameron]

No, steamapps is cleaned out. It's got about 4 gigs in there, which accounts for the mysteriously-still-existent Half Life 2 and whatever I've downloaded in the last hour. Last time I checked, there were more than 20 gigs in there.

Totally bizarre and hardly confidence-building.

[marxeil]

Around the time that the Orange box was released, Steam stopped functioning for me. I couldn't play any of my games for almost a month. It happened again once or twice but not for such long durations.
This combined with their frustrating customer service is very annoying.