With the popular Steam client now on Mac, many of us sole Mac owner have the opportunity to play some of the best games on the PC on a Mac without the need of Bootcamp, virtualisation or CrossOver.
One slight annoyance has come of this that I didn’t notice till halfway through the process: Steam stores all the contents (such as games and other binaries) in a folder called “Steam Contents” that is pleasantly located in your home Documents folder. If you are like me, you keep your actual documents in that folder and not settings or any other jazz; I also backup this folder to my SugarSync account that syncs across various machines.
Annoyingly, I only have 10GB that I use and that space is for important stuffs – ironically, games aren’t important enough for me to backup – and this is a huge folder, mine currently clocking in at 2GB (only got 1 game installed). A lot of people maybe using solid-state drives, which space is at a premium and don’t want a large folder as so on their SDD but rather an external drive.
Luckily there is a solution that the smarter Mac users might have known about but for those who didn’t know *puts hand up* this will be a life saver!
Symbolic Linking
Basically, this will make a shortcut link to any given folder on the system (much the same as Windows “Shortcuts”), allowing you to move the Steam Contents somewhere better suited.
There are two ways of doing this, but first you need to quit out of Steam completely and then move the Steam Contents folder to where you want it to be. Now comes the choice…
Terminal
If you are feeling upto command-lined then give this way a go as it’s possibly the quickest.
Fire up terminal.app and enter the following line.
ln -s /[NEW LOCATION]/Steam Content ~/Documents/Steam Content
Where [NEW LOCATION] is, replace where the file path is. Now there is a link in the Documents folder that makes Steam think it’s in Documents!
Download SymbolicLinker
If you are lazy like me and think you will be doing this a few times, or rather not mess around in Terminal then you can download SymbolicLinker for free.
Follow the install instructions and then right/alt click on the Steam Contents folder (in it’s new, more favorable, location), go to More context menu and click on “Make Symbolic Link”.
This will produce another folder with a tiny arrow in the bottom left; move this to the Documents folder and Steam will now have access to the Steam Contents folder despite it not “actually” being there.
In Conclusion
Not a perfect solution; it would be nice for Steam to allow you to specifiy a location within the software, but till they do this is the next best thing!
Update 22/06/10
Jesper has commented that Steam is to update where the contents is located from ~/Documents to ~/Library/Application Support/Steam. Thanks for the little info Jesper!
