I have a game that I play on my Windows 7 system that wants to place large amounts of texture and other data into my user profile at C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle

While I specified specifically to install to my F: drive and leave C: free from game installation data, I confirmed that the game client was installed to my F: drive, but was NOTIFIED that C: was running low on disk space tonight when gaming and so I went to look for the cause. Finding my user profile to be huge, I dug deeper and found that the game client for the video game is saving texture and other large amounts of data here in my user profile and thats not good on a 40GB SSD that is jam packed to begin with Windows 7 64-bit eating up the MAJORITY of 40GB fully patched.

Looking at Google for a way to have the folder exist at C:\users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle for the game to run and be satisfied with a path that didnt really change but instead have any calls to files located at  C:\users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle to be directly passed to F:\GameTitle\GameTextures   the closest thing I could come up with was using the subst command , BUT this doesnt work the way I thought it would.

Here is what I tried with failure.

Moved the folder with all 1.6GB of data to F:\GameTitle\GameTextures
Created a local share to F:\GameTitle\GameTextures so it can be mapped
Mapped this share to Y: so when going to Y: its really F:\GameTitle\GameTextures
Tried to use Subst with
subst Y: C:\users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle
to bind C:\users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle to the destination path of Y: since subst doesnt ALLOW for you to basically state I want to join C:\users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle with F:\GameTitle\GameTextures

* Found out that I misinterpreted how subst works and so subst ACTUALLY needs to create a drive letter and can not use an already available drive letter as a redirect method 

Anyone know of any work arounds for redirection like this?

Of course there is always the path of least resistance and basically rebuilding the system new with a larger SSD drive for C: but trying to avoid that on this system if POSSIBLE and find a redirection method if one exists even in 3rd party software form that I havent been able to locate yet but someone might be aware of here to share.


mklink is probably what you want.

Code: [Select]Creates a symbolic link.

MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target

        /D      Creates a directory symbolic link.  Default is a file
                symbolic link.
        /H      Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
        /J      Creates a Directory Junction.
        Link    specifies the new symbolic link name.
        Target  specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link
                refers to.

In your case, you want to have the symbolic link as the folder in appdata. so you would move the "GameTitle" folder from C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Local to somewhere else, say, F:\GameData\GameTitle. Then use:

Code: [Select]mklink /D "C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle" "F:\GameData\GameTitle"

The folder in Appdata should appear with a shortcut icon but it will be "transparent" to applications accessing anything inside C:\users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle that the real location is actually on another drive.

SWEET... Thanks BC

Btw to get this to work it required the command shell to be in admin mode. Also I had to delete the GameTitle folder at C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Local\GameTitle for the symbolic link to be created, otherwise it gives you an error message about unable to create a file. I should have copy/pasted it here to give exact syntax for the error, but the fix is to remove the GameTitle folder at the profile for the symbolic link to assume the identity of the folder location.

Now watching the size of F:\GameData\GameTitle to make sure that its writing changes to here. the more places you go to in the game the larger this gets. The game is a small install, but it caches artwork of the game and grows the more you explore and more unique textures in game etc which then get added to this local texture cache location.

Thanks so much man