Windows App of the Week: Steam Mover
If you’ve played on Valve’s Steam service for a decent amount of time, you’ve probably heard ofSteam Mover . It’s a great tool for porting your multi-gigabyte Steam games to different hard drives on your system if your main hard drive is running low on space (or bursting at the seams).
What we love about Steam Mover – and we touched on it briefly the last time we talked about the app – is that its usefulness isn’t limited to Steam games. Oh no. The application can create symbolic links on your system to any folder you want; you are not limited to just \ steamapps \.
Symbolic links in plain English
A symbolic link is like a pointer. It tells Windows that the contents of the X folder are actually in the Y folder, although we are going to keep the X folder for a number of reasons.
For example, suppose you have a zipped folder of RAW photos in the default Windows Pictures folder. RAW images take up a ton of space and you would like to move them elsewhere. However, you don’t have to constantly switch between hard drives in your chosen photo editing tool. You can of course solve the latter with shortcuts. Symbolic links allow you to move your RAW photos to an additional hard drive, but you can still access them by going to the original archive folder under Pictures. The files are not actually there, but they will look as if they were.
And, obviously, symbolic links are great if you need to move apps – or subfolders that take up a huge amount of space in the main app installation folder – but want to keep the original app directory structure intact.
There are other Windows tools you can use to automate the creation of these symbolic links, but the Steam Mover is useful because its GUI shows you where the folder is actually located and gives you a handy “click the arrows” setting to move it back and forward to the original (or new) location.
Do you have a Windows app (paid or free) that you really like? Tell us about it: [email protected] .