How exactly do symbolic links work?

Warhawk373 · May 15, 2017

I needed to make a symbolic link to reroute steam workshop mods to my secondary drive. It worked but there's one thing I'm confused about. When I start the download and it allocates the space for the mod, it will show that only space on the main drive is being used. Then when the download is finished, the main drive will free up and the secondary drive will be used.

Does this mean that it is writing to my main drive, then just moving the files?

I know it takes a very long time to corrupt an SSD from writing too much to it but I would just like to know if it is writing to my SSD then moving to my HDD.

USAFRet · May 15, 2017

symlinks is a mostly outdated concept.
There is little need for it today.

It is showing space on the main drive (your SSD?), because that is where you have tricked it to think it is.

And downloading something almost always goes through the temp file on the "main drive", just because.

Don't worry about your SSD dying from too many writes.. It will become obsolete due to size long before it actually wears out.

Warhawk373 · May 15, 2017

USAFRet :

Yeah it seemed like a pretty crude way to do it but that's the only way I could figure out how to get steam workshop mods to download to a file separate from where steam is downloaded. You would think something as big as steam would just add a feature to allow you to change the file location lol

USAFRet · May 15, 2017

Warhawk373 :

Why did you need to do that?
If space is the issue, redo your whole Steam thing.
Install the client on the second drive. Presumably the workshop mods would be happy like that, with no symlink folderol.

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How exactly do symbolic links work?

Warhawk373

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Warhawk373

Commendable

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