Moving the Vortex Mods Staging Folder for Skyrim SE: Old Topic But Do Not See Answer in Reply Strings

[Gorgopis]

Please note: Our (two of us sharing pc) Skyrim SE is on Drive E, and our Vortex Mod Staging Folder for Skyrim SE (and for Skyrim LE) is on Drive D, according to the Vortex tab.

Mods all work fine in-game.

But Drive D is now out of space, and we can no longer add downloaded mods via the drop files option in the Vortex app. 

We believe we should easily be able to move the staging folder from D to E, without reinstalling Skyrim SE, or going through STEAM.

We do not know how at this stage.  We do have modded Skyrim LE on drive D, and do not know if that will affect any possible attempts to move the staging folder.  STEAM seems to know where all of our Bethesda games are located (3 different drives). 

We would appreciate any advice from Vortex experts.  We have searched through the Vortex topic strings, but may have missed a reply with a direct answer to this topic.

Thanks in advance.  

[showler]

Please clarify:

"Staging Folder" is the folder the mods are installed to.

"Downloads folder" is the folder the archives from Nexus Mods are downloaded to.

Your Staging folder should be on the same drive as the game unless you are using the "move deployment" method, which would require you to use twice as much HD space as necessary by keeping an extra copy of all the mod files.  Is that the case?

[Pickysaurus]

To move your staging folder. Simply change the path under Settings -> Mods and click Apply 

[Gorgopis]

OK, to make sure we understand. 

When we drag and drop a downloaded mod from our PC "C" drive downloads-folder into Vortex, we presume that Vortex moves them into the dedicated staging folder, where Vortex "looks" to enable or disable them in-game, based on preferred profiles.

Right now, Vortex settings show us that the path to the staging folder is on our "D" drive, a drive which has gotten too full.  So when we now try and drag and drop a mod into Vortex, we get a message, "drive is full."  (There is not enough memory left on D to allow Vortex to stage the new mods into the dedicated  folder.)

We believe, based on the above replies, that simply changing the path under Vortex Settings from the D-drive to the E-drive, Vortex will next move the staged mods from D to E, and Vortex will see/create the staging folder on E.

We do not remember implementing a "move deployment" method, but we do remember discussing our surprise about how the mod-staging folder was on D, and yet our game was on E, but the game worked fine after deploying mods via Vortex.

Please accept our apologies for our ignorance.  Note for reply-completionists: we recently purged from our C-drive downloads folder many Nexus Mods still held in there.  We originally had left them there, in case we made mistakes, and needed to add them to Vortex again.  

Thx. 

[Gorgopis]

For anyone reading this string, or looking over our shoulders, we have found the remedy for our case, thanks to the advice above, which caused us to re-examine our downloads folders in the different drives.

Our main download folder in C-drive  had every mod from the beginning of time still in there for both SRLE and SSSE. We were reluctant to delete these, in case we needed to reinstall.  So, yesterday, we copied them,

zipped them, and saved them to a flash drive.  Then we sent the originals all to the recycle bin. It was the same story for our Vortex Downloads Staging folder on D. Too full, and these downloads were subtracting more and more space from D.  

We copied all already-game-installed mods on D to another zipped folder and saved them also to the flash drive. Then we sent the already-installed original mods to the recycle bin, while leaving still-uninstalled downloaded mods in that folder.

We were next puzzled that the D-drive details still showed the same low-memory, and then we realized that links must still exist between the freshly-deleted files in the recycle bin and their original locations on the D-drive. We therefore emptied the recycle bin,

and now our D-drive showed more space!  Thus, we were able to install the as-yet uninstalled mods in the D staging folder to our game on E via Vortex mod-deployment Beta.  Thanks for reading!