Moved Downloads folder - Downloads folder now empty

[chazzranger]

For Skyrim SE.
Yeah I screwed something up :pinch:

Already had lots of mods installed and enabled. Needed to make space, so I moved the Downloads folder off SSD and onto HDD. Then in Settings, I pointed Vortex to new Downloads folder location. Suddenly I had two of every mod appear in Vortex, one Installed, the other Never Installed. Without thinking, I deleted all the Never Installed mods from within Vortex, which obviously then deleted all the mods in the new Downloads folder.

Will this be a problem and if so, is it fixable, or will I need to re-download everything and start over? :ermm:

[BigBizkit]

It sounds like you manually moved your download folder. You should have moved it from within Vortex. That way the mods would not have become disassociated from the archives.

 

I suppose you ticked the checkbox to also remove the archives when you deleted them?

 

Your mods should still be managed and functional, but you are now lacking the archives, so you cannot reinstall the mods. To do that you would have to redownload and reinstall them, I am afraid.

[Zanderat]

Or maybe go to your mod staging folder and then:

1. copy them back to another temporary folder (make sure that you leave the original file intact)
2. compress the copied version
3. and then copy that compressed version back to your new downloads folder

That could work if it is not too many mods. It would become quite tedious if you have a lot, I would imagine.

[chazzranger]

Thx guys! Yes I totally did manually move the Downloads folder, I should've ask the best way to do this first :sad:

[Tannin42]

Well, think of it this way: You freed up a lot of disk space... ;)

 

There is no reason to act really, all your mods will just continue to work. As BigBizkit said: You won't be able to reinstall the mods without downloading them again but apart from that everything should be good.

And who knows, by the time you want to reinstall a mod it may have been updated and you would have downloaded the newer version anyway.

[chazzranger]

Thx Tannin! Related to another post I just made, is it worth it to reinstall Vortex on my HDD and just have the Mods folder on SSD? How much space would I save on the SSD this way?

[Tannin42]

You can't. Unfortunately the bethesda games opt out of symbolic links so we have to use hard links which only work within the same drive so the mod staging folder has to be on the same drive (or more precise: on the same partition) as the game.