Hi,

 

Has anyone done this and if so does it move everything, main install, and the community folder?  

 SSD 80% full on the 500Gb (who'd have thought!) and going to move it all to a M.2 980 pro 2TB

 

I'm fairly sure it will only move the Flight sim app itself, which is very small, not even worth doing it.

However, moving the Content ( Official and Community together ), which is 99% of the space, is fairly easy, just move the folder that *contains" the Community folder and the Official folder ( they MUST be moved together) to any other location, then edit the last line of this file:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft Flight Simulator\USERCFG.OPT

the line to edit is the last one, which looks like this:

InstalledPackagesPath "xxxxxxx"

Put the new path, inside double quotes, in the new folder you created on the new drive. My Content is here:

E:\MSFS_STEAM  ( contains Community and Official )

So my line looks like this:

InstalledPackagesPath "E:\MSFS_STEAM"
 

Thanks Umberto. What you say makes sense. I did think the Steam method was only the core files.

I have seen a similar method you described somewhere else. I just want to be 100% sure before I do the task !  Sounds pretty straight forward. There's also a couple of other ways with the Addon Manager and also using the HardLinkShell tool but they are mainly to move the community folder. I suppose that folder is 99% of the problem though. 

I should also be thinking "copy" and not "move" because the old one can just stay there as a backup and FS will then work to the new location.

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by flyhalf

2 hours ago, flyhalf said:

Hi,

 

Has anyone done this and if so does it move everything, main install, and the community folder?  

 SSD 80% full on the 500Gb (who'd have thought!) and going to move it all to a M.2 980 pro 2TB

 

An option that I went for was just simply moving my Community Folder to my second NVME.  I had same issue as you.  My 500GB NVME was 90% full so I installed a new 980 EVO 1TB  as an additional drive and just moved my community folder over there.  Then I just point Addon Linker to it.  

Jase

3 hours ago, JaseMelbo said:

An option that I went for was just simply moving my Community Folder to my second NVME.  I had same issue as you.  My 500GB NVME was 90% full so I installed a new 980 EVO 1TB  as an additional drive and just moved my community folder over there.  Then I just point Addon Linker to it.  

Jase

Could you explain that in more detail?  The earlier suggestion by Umberto makes sense and should work..

What you are are describing is either incomplete or unlikely to be sucessful..

Seems to have worked gentlemen, thanks. No strange errors, loaded some addon scenery straight up after doing the move.

 

Addon Linker would be another option yes, rather than editing the cfg file. 

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by flyhalf

14 minutes ago, flyhalf said:

Addon Linker would be another option yes, rather than editing the cfg file. 

You can still use the Addons Linker.  It very useful.  Not "rather than" but "as well as"..

Editing the cfg file allows you to move the Official+Community folders to a new drive.

The Addons Linker allows you to move most of the content out of the Community folder to a third location/folder and enable only the parts that you want to be active at any point in time.

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by Bert Pieke

6 hours ago, virtuali said:

I'm fairly sure it will only move the Flight sim app itself, which is very small, not even worth doing it.

However, moving the Content ( Official and Community together ), which is 99% of the space, is fairly easy, just move the folder that *contains" the Community folder and the Official folder ( they MUST be moved together) to any other location, then edit the last line of this file:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft Flight Simulator\USERCFG.OPT

the line to edit is the last one, which looks like this:

InstalledPackagesPath "xxxxxxx"

Put the new path, inside double quotes, in the new folder you created on the new drive. My Content is here:

E:\MSFS_STEAM  ( contains Community and Official )

So my line looks like this:

InstalledPackagesPath "E:\MSFS_STEAM"
 

If you do this, what effect does it have on addon installers that auto look for those content paths?  I.e. do those usually look at the config file or is that info also stored in the Registry and installers are checking the registry for the community folder path?

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by flyinion

Good question 

58 minutes ago, flyinion said:

If you do this, what effect does it have on addon installers that auto look for those content paths?  I.e. do those usually look at the config file or is that info also stored in the Registry and installers are checking the registry for the community folder path?

Orbx Central, for example, looks at Usercfg.opt\InstalledPackagesPath and must also find a Community folder at that path.
So long as this remains the case, manually editing the usercfg.opt file and moving the folders will not stop it from working.

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by Reader

3 hours ago, flyhalf said:

Addon Linker would be another option yes, rather than editing the cfg file. 

Editing the usercfg.opt file IS the best option in this case, because:

- You are moving the whole "Content" folder, not JUST the Community. That's results in an additional 130GB of savings, because even the Official folder gets moved.

- If you use the Addon Linker to move the Community only and make a link to it, add-ons that use the link method to install will be "linked to a link", this might work but it's surely confusing, and links might have side effects, depending which kind of link they are ( Symbolic Links or Junctions). The best and more modern are Symbolic links but, for example, they work ONLY if the target drive is NTFS.

Most external drives ships pre-formatted as exFat (so they can work with Windows, Mac and Linux), so we found a couple of cases were users that moved the whole content folder to an external drive didn't realized that, and every add-on installer that made links didn't work, so we updated our installer to create Junctions in case Symbolic links couldn't be used.

Of course using an external drive for MSFS content is not a very good idea to begin with (unless is an ultra expensive Thunderbolt 4, just the cable would cost more than a simple USB external drive), but in the real world you never know what users can come up with so, you want to keep things as simple as possible, trying to stick to the method the sim expects to use and, in this case, the InstalledPackagesPath  path line in the USERCFG.OPT is exactly the "official" method to have the MSFS Content installed in a different drive than the base program, so I'd stick to it.

You can keep using the Addon Linker to link add-ons (those that are not already using links on their own, of course), but for the base installation, the USERCFG.OPT is the safer way.

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by virtuali

Something tells me that Steam has a right to know what you've done with its stuff but I might be wrong, or do third party installations look for and find the usercfg.opt file first ?

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by flyhalf

2 hours ago, flyhalf said:

Something tells me that Steam has a right to know what you've done with its stuff but I might be wrong

As I've said, as far as Steam is concerned, MSFS 2020 is JUST the small app you download initially. The rest of the installation is handled entirely by the sim itself, and Steam doesn't know anything about it.

 

2 hours ago, flyhalf said:

do third party installations look for and find the usercfg.opt file first ?

Sure they do, how they are supposed to find the Community folder to begin with ?

10 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

Could you explain that in more detail?  The earlier suggestion by Umberto makes sense and should work..

What you are are describing is either incomplete or unlikely to be sucessful..

Works perfectly.  All you do is tell addon linker where your community folder files are held.  Just put your community folder add ons on the new NVME.  That's what I did and it works perfectly.

Jase

1 minute ago, JaseMelbo said:

Works perfectly.  All you do is tell addon linker where your community folder files are held.  Just put your community folder add ons on the new NVME.  That's what I did and it works perfectly.

Jase

What you are describing now, is indeed fine... move the Community folder contents, not the folder itself.. 😉