That way if and when you have to reinstall it, you won't lose all the settings in your folders. i.e. all of your community assets, all of your streamed assets, and all of your settings for which of these assets are active and which are deactivated. Some people here and even more people on the official forum lost all their controller profiles too. There's hundreds of messages about this on at least two threads in the official forum. That was when a "phantom update" happened to them caused by Asobo error.

If msfs2024 is working, you can just move the installation. And then you are probably protected if you ever have to uninstall and reinstall 2024. Because the faulty reinstallation will be placed in the default location. Which you can now switch to your custom location, and all will probably be well. Anyway, it probably saved me twenty hours of work. It only took me a half hour to get back up and running.

 

 

 

 

just like you store your personal data on a separate non-Windows partition in case Windows strikes and all that's left is Format drive C:/

but wasn't that best practice ever since FSX 1.0 / Windows 1.0?

1 hour ago, Fielder said:

Because the faulty reinstallation will be placed in the default location. Which you can now switch to your custom location, and all will probably be well.

I agree that having the Content in a custom location is the way to go... but as you have seen in the previous posts, even then, Settings and some Content can disappear..  Only a backup of these files can totally protect you.

Here is why you should move it. This poor guy did not. Now he has hours and hours of work to do (controller mappings, and restoring everything in his community folder). I don't have that work to do because I had moved my msfs2024 installation location out of the default location months and months ago.

 

Use the small cogwheel icon in 2024 MyLibrary to move the location. And then move or copy all the stuff in your old location over to that new location, using windows file explorer.

1 use the cogwheel icon to set a new installation location.

2 move the stuff from the old to the new location using windows file explorer.

And now if you or Asobo messes up and you have to remove and reinstall msfs2024, nothing will be lost nor changed. Because the new msfs2024 does not even know about your new installation location. So nothing in it will be destroyed.

Edited March 24, 20251 yr by Fielder

13 minutes ago, Fielder said:

Use the small cogwheel icon in 2024 MyLibrary to move the location. And then move or copy all the stuff in your old location over to that new location, using windows file explorer.

1 use the cogwheel icon to set a new installation location.

2 move the stuff from the old to the new location using windows file explorer.

And now if you or Asobo messes up and you have to remove and reinstall msfs2024, nothing will be lost nor changed. Because the new msfs2024 does not even know about your new installation location. So nothing in it will be destroyed.

Is this for the community folder specifically?

11 minutes ago, V1ROTA7E said:

Is this for the community folder specifically?

No, it's for all the folders inside the one folder listed in MSFS My Library path. Move them all. I had 4 o them to move:

Community

Official2020

Official2024

StreamedPackages

 

(If I had not moved Streamed Packages for instance, it would have cost me lots of work to get back up and running, involving going through all the packages to choose the ones I wanted activated and deactivated). A lot the hundred or so of them listed as "not approved" work fine and I have activated them. But not all of them do work fine and I have deactivated them. It took a lot of trial and error testing which I don't want to redo).

1 minute ago, Fielder said:

No, it's for all the folders inside the one folder listed in MSFS My Library path. Move them all. I had 4 o them to move:

Community

Official2020

Official2024

StreamedPackages

 

(If I had not moved Streamed Packages for instance, it would have cost me lots of work to get back up and running, involving going through all the packages to choose the ones I wanted activated and deactivated). A lot the hundred or so of them listed as "not approved" work fine and I have activated them. But not all of them do work fine and I have deactivated them. It took a lot of trial and error testing which I don't want to redo).

Oh ok, cool. So if you use addon linker, would you link stuff to the new location, and FS would read it as if it’s all normal?

Yes, and that is a better solution.

msfs2024 only puts links into the Streamed Packages folder, not the whole assets. Which is just like what AddonLinker does. Doing things with AddonLinker is best. And MSFS never sees all your assets in the Addon Linker folder, so it won't corrupt them.

Back before msfs2024 existed, and it was only early days in 2020, MS decided to open betas for public participation. And when they did, they put a message that beta users should change the default location of msfs2020. Well, the same thing applies to msfs2024.

Where is the MSFS My Library path specified in MSFS 2020 ?  Is it *.CFG file, it it somewhere in the application itself ?

43 minutes ago, zachlog said:

Where is the MSFS My Library path specified in MSFS 2020 ?  Is it *.CFG file, it it somewhere in the application itself ?

Last line of the UserCfg.opt file.  (In Local Cache folder).

2 hours ago, Fielder said:

Because the new msfs2024 does not even know about your new installation location. So nothing in it will be destroyed.

Ehh... The sim does know, and it can delete at will.  🫢

1 hour ago, zachlog said:

Where is the MSFS My Library path specified in MSFS 2020 ?  Is it *.CFG file, it it somewhere in the application itself ?

You can change it here, in this box. Whatever you type in there will be copied exactly and properly typed into the last line of the UserCfg.opt file automatically when you next reboot msfs2020.

Edited March 24, 20251 yr by Fielder

2 hours ago, Fielder said:

You can change it here, in this box. Whatever you type in there will be copied exactly and properly typed into the last line of the UserCfg.opt file automatically when you next reboot msfs2020.

What you're suggesting is what I have been doing all along.  MSFS2020 has been so stable for a long time (I just aviate !) so I have not dealt with its internals recently plus I misunderstood the issue.

Thanks !