Migrating Vortex and All Mods to New Drive- Please Advise

[Phylistine]

Hi-

 

Just purchased a large SSD to replace my HDD which has always had a screeching disk noise. Since I do some music recording, the HDD will not be remaining in the system (need it quiet). I'm looking for a way to migrate all downloaded mods and the vortex install itself to the new drive (preferably without having to re-download mods). Can anyone advise on the steps to do this? Current thought is migrating the mods folder then uninstalling Vortex, and then reinstalling Vortex into the new location and pointing to the migrated mods path? Not quite sure how to do so cleanly though or if there's a better option. Thanks.

 

edit- also need the mods to register properly to check for updates and the like, as if they'd been downloaded normally.

[Guest deleted34304850]

cant you just clone your existing disk to your new one? if its a direct replacement that would be the easiest thing.

[Tannin42]

The important part is really the paths.

 

Assuming you have the old HDD still connected as the system drive C: and the SSD is D: but when you disconnect the HDD the SSD becomes C: then you shouldn't change the download/staging paths in Vortex settings at all, just move the folders to the new disk using windows explorer, also copy the entire %APPDATA%\vortex directory to the new disk. Make sure the folder structure for everything is the same on the new disk.

Then, once you have disconnected the HDD and the SSD has taken over the drive letter you can just continue using Vortex (reinstall it if you like). Since all paths are the same as before, Vortex won't even know it was moved.

The same is true if the HDD has any other drive letter and the new SSD will take over that drive letter after the switch: Just move over the directories manually and don't run the application until the switch is complete. Applications (Vortex) don't really care about which disk they are on physically, they just care about paths (e.g. c:\vortex mods\skyrim). If the paths to the games and other folders (downloads, staging) stay the same, they are happy.

 

Whether you uninstall the vortex application before and reinstall it after or whether you move the program files dir over doesn't really matter, installing/uninstalling vortex only affects the application files, not your data. As long as the data is still where Vortex had it the last time it ran, everything is good.