Steam “not enough free disk space” error when attempting to move game folder

steam

I have Steam libraries on two different disk drives. When attempting to move a game from one to the other, the operation fails with "not enough free disk space" error even though there is plenty of room on the destination drive. I tried this with three different games. They use 1.7, 7, and 14GB; the destination drive has 41GB free, both according to the command line and to Steam (as displayed in Preferences->Downloads->STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS).

In what may be a related issue, uninstalling a game in Steam did not result in its game files being removed from the disk drive (under $LIBRARY/steamapps/common).

Apparently there's supposed to be some way to Repair Library Folders but this option doesn't show up in the context ("right-click") menu for me. Maybe it's a Windows-only thing. Oh, yeah: I'm running under OSX 10.10.

Best Answer

I discovered a workaround that involves copying the game files over manually and "reinstalling":

  • Copy game directory under $LIBRARY_LOCATION/steamapps/common over to some other location on the destination drive (e.g. ~/tmp) using the command line or however you do such things
  • Use the Steam client to uninstall the game (i.e. right-click and select Uninstall...)
  • Exit the Steam client
  • Move the copy into the common directory in the Steam library on the destination volume (e.g. /Steam/steamapps/common/)
  • Restart Steam
  • The game will still appear as not installed. Tell Steam to install it the normal way in the destination library, i.e. the one you just moved the copy into
  • This should happen quite quickly, i.e. without the need for Steam to download anything. If the game is sizeable there will be a delay while Steam is "Discovering existing files".
  • Click Play and enjoy

I'd still like to know how to fix whatever issue is making it necessary to to this, so please contribute an answer if you have info.

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