Friday, March 27, 2015

Steam Game Migration: Laptop A, Hard Drive, to Laptop B, USB 3.0 external storage drive

Recently moved a Steam installation of "Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth", per the subject of this post.

A few hiccups, but we got there. Laptop B had an existing installation of Steam on the C:\ (an internal SSD). However, due to space limitations on the primary internal SSD, we wanted to install the downloadable content on an external USB SSD (in this case, a Samsung T1 Portable 250GB USB 3.0 External SSD).

  • Uninstalled Steam on Laptop B C:\
  • Re-installed Steam on Laptop B external USB SSD (D:\Steam) (note: in retrospect, probably could have left Steam on the C:\ and configured Steam to look in D:\Steam as a library location, instead...however, this may not represent much of an issue, moving forward)
  • Connect external USB SSD to Laptop A
  • Copy Laptop A Steam subfolder "Steamapps" to external USB SSD (note: need to ensure manifest file(s) gets copied...for example, Steam\Steamapps\appmanifest_65980.acf)
  • Connect external USB SSD to Laptop B
  • Start Steam on Laptop B
  • Verify integrity of the game cache on Laptop B
Once verified, proceed with playing the game.

At this point, we need to test whether running the game from the USB 3.0 flash drive will work, performance-wise.

UPDATE: Performance seems quite acceptable.

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