How can you move or transfer a Minecraft root folder to another drive?

I have recently gotten my hands on a new computer (MSI G Series GS70 STEALTH-037 - specs below if relevant) that has a Solid State Drive (SSD) that goes along with my hard drive (HDD). I would like to move Minecraft to the SSD is because it will be a lot smoother and faster than on the hard drive.

How can I move/transfer/change Minecraft from using the typical root it goes to in the %appdata% folder to the SSD drive?

PC Specs:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-4700HQ 2.4 GHz (6 MB Cache)
• RAM: 12 GB DDR3L SDRAM
• Drives: 750 GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive, 128 GB Solid-State Drive
• Display/Graphics: 17.3-Inch Screen, NVIDIA GeForce GTX860M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
• OS: Windows 8.1

1

5 Answers

There are 3 easy steps you need to take to move Minecraft to your SSD.

1. Find your .minecraft folder.

Your .minecraft folder should be located in %appdata%\.minecraft on your computer.

2. Move your .minecraft folder.

Copy the entire .minecraft folder to your SSD. Lets assume your SSD is D: and you copy the folder to the directory D:\Games\.minecraft

3. Let Minecraft know.

You finally have to tell the Minecraft launcher that the game is now located on D:. Open your Minecraft launcher and click Edit Profile. When the dialogue box opens, tick the Game Directory check box and type in the new directory:

You can check that you put in the correct directory by clicking the "Open Game Dir" button.

Click Save Profile and your done! Minecraft will now be loading from your SSD.

4

You can use mklink to create a directory junction, which will enable you to access Minecraft in the usual way while it is physically stored elsewhere (in your case, on another drive).

Move the Minecraft folder where you want it to physically reside, then hit Win-R, enter cmd, hit Enter and input the following command:

mklink /j link target, where target is the new location of the Minecraft folder and link is where it originally was.

Example: mklink /j C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Roaming\.minecraft D:\Minecraft

7

Assuming you are on Windows, this might be easy.

This link has a solution that is simple enough. In summary:

1. move/copy the .minecraft folder to another location
2. create a batch file that sets the APPDATA environment variable (for that session) to the folder you want minecraft to run in and then execute the minecraft.exe
3. run the batch when you wish to play

This said, I think the biggest thing you can do to improve minecraft performance is to give it more RAM (either by having more RAM and/or telling the Java process it can use more memory) if you aren't already.

NOTE: Calling "SET" in a batch file only SET's the environment variable for that command window session. It does not affect any other session/window except those launched from that window. IOW, it's harmless for this purpose.

4

Even when you choose the game directory minecraft will still work on the main drive. On the game directory are saved only texture packs and saves. So basically useless

In Windows you have local profile of Minecraft in %APPDATA%.minecraft. Assuming you want to move .minecraft to your SSD disk D:

1. Move directory %APPDATA%.minecraft to D:\Games\

2. Run CMD as administrator and execute:

   mklink /j %APPDATA%\.minecraft D:\Games\.minecraft

You will have junction in your profile and you can use both of them in Minecraft Launcher.