Advice needed, I am always at odds with my boot harddrive and running out of space. I have a SSD Macbook pro and several external hard drives. Whenever I see an obvious possibility to load plug-ins or applications to a drive other than the boot drive I do so, but I’m losing my mind trying to figure out what I can safely move to the external drives without screwing up everything.

Yes, I have Komplete Collectors edition, Arturia V Collection, Superior Drummer 3, Logic Pro, Digital Performer, Studio One, and Ableton studio and many many other libraries. I see the option with Native Instruments App to find and locate missing plugs. Most of which are on the external drive or a library folder.

Does anyone have a strategy for moving apps and plugs to the external 4tb drive without causing apps to fail or plug ins to be “not located”

I don’t understand why apps often must be installed on the drive with the Mac OS on it, I can usually work around by putting applications on the boot drive and whatever data on the external 4tb, but I’m slowly losing control.

No small lift here, but if anyone has a strategy to move things successfully I’d really appreciate the advice.

Many thanks and best wishes for the season!

As far as I know, apps and plugins themselves must always be installed on your boot drive. The installers put them there. No way to change this.

Apps and plugins don't take up much hard drive space.
It is the sample data (if it is a sample-based VI) that requires the large amount of space. Some installers will give you the option to install the sample data on another drive..Superior Drummer 3, for example, allows this option. Some Amplesound guitar VI's allow the option, but oddly, some of their products don't. I have no idea why this is.

At any rate, applications and plugins must install to your boot drive. Fact of life.

First off, don't move system files. Stuff like .exe's and the .dll's that are installed by the apps themselves. That's asking for trouble, besides, it's not necessary as they are usually trivially small in size compared to data files like sound banks and presets and these days (looking at you Arturia) massive Graphics libraries for the plugin GUI's.

If you want to see what gets installed where then a great program is 'Everything' -
https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

It's super quick and you can do many commands for searches. For example. If I just installed a program called 'Infiltrator' on my computer, and I want to find what different locations it installed to, I type in 'infiltrator' and all drives that are indexed will return a result if that is on them. If I just want to search the C: system drive then I type: 'infiltrator c:' and now only results from the C: drive will return. It's not exhaustive because programs can still install stuff in to other places using different names, but it's a good quick way to get a handle on a new installation. It's surprising the crap that programs scatter all over your drive. And the random places they scatter them to. And don't forget to include the manufacturer of the plugin when doing a search. In this case, I might want to do a search for 'Devious Machines' (the maker of Infiltrator) as well. This program can find individual files as well as folders.

Another good program for seeing what crap goes where is Revo Uninstaller. OK, you kind of need to go through the steps of uninstalling the program, but it does show you the many locations including registry entries that don't always get deleted/uninstalled when you actually uninstall a program.

If you wanted to get an idea beforehand of where a program will install stuff to you could use a program like Sandboxie. It's a light virtualisation program and if you install a program in a clean sandbox it will show you the directories it installs to but in a virtual environment which you can safely delete later. Again, not exhaustive, but another handy program to have in the toolbox for this kind of detective work.

With some programs you can get lucky and they allow you to move data/content folders. But lots don't. Even so, you can still move those folders and free up MASSIVE amounts of disk space on your OS/System drive (hard drive manufacturers HATE this trick!)

Ha ha, not really, coz you still need to buy more hard disks to put all that content on.



It's possible to set and move data paths with Komplete via the Native Access program. It's one of the better ones for allowing you to do this. Works well. Also Arturia allow you to migrate or move your Program Data folder where most of the gubbins of their plugins get installed - those massive GUI files I was just mentioning. That also works well. It's also possible to move and reset your data/content path with Studio One. Another good program that lets the end user have some control over their shit. Ableton is also another winner when it comes to allowing you control over your user library and installed packs. You just need to set the new path in preferences after you move stuff around.

So far, so good...



For the last time! Do NOT move apps or plugins about. They are trivial in size and it is asking for trouble. It can be done. But even then, it just leads to confusion. I've got 10 DAW's installed on my new (old) box and all with massive Multi-Gig libraries. My latest image/clone of the drive is under 100GB!

So this makes life easier once you accept that. And it really saves a lot of time as well, now, and later, when your external drive goes kaput or you drop it and it stops working. You gain nothing by moving apps or plugins. Don't do it!

With that said, any presets/soundbanks/packs/expansions/ etc. etc. are fair game. I've just moved over a 100 Gigs of BFD3 expansions off the system drive, though to be be fair, the installers do give you the option of setting separate data/content drives. Sometimes you just end up doing something someway for whatever reason and you need to change it later, but without all the faffing about with re-installing stuff.

This is where Symbolic and Hard Linking comes in to play. It's worked great for every single thing I've tried it on so far. It opens up a whole new world. It's basically putting a fancy shortcut to the folder in the old place where the folder used to be, where the app/program is expecting it to be. So if your data path is hard coded to C:\ProgramData\Whatever..

.. then you just link back to there from the new place you moved the files to. So you can get a USB3 SSD 1TB drive for less than 50 bucks now, and that should do most people for storing their Komplete library, their Studio One/Presonus packs, their Ableton Live packs... plus whatever sample libraries they may have from Samples from Mars, Wave Alchemy...

I mean, most people, not all.

But don't go moving/migrating your Arturia program data there though, you need that to be on an internal drive even if it's not your main system drive. External drives are generally a lot slower with most protocols that people will be using. Another internal SSD is great for stuff like this. It frees up your main OS/System drive, but it's still fast enough for the purposes you want. If you have a large enough system drive (1TB) then of course it's more ideal to keep ALL your Arturia default installs on there. Just one example.

Another: I let Ableton have a bit of space on my main system drive. I'm about to migrate to 500GB up from 250GB. I still put the Live packs I have though on another drive. I'm working them off an external USB3 SSD right now, but I'm going to be putting in another 1TB SSD internally for stuff like this.

Another reason not to move system app/program files is for purposes of backing up. You do back up don't you? For reasons I won't go in to (if it's not obvious), it makes life much easier and quicker and safer and more secure to have your system app/program files compartmentalised from your data/soundsets/samples/expansions.

One reason being it's quicker to back up. You'll probably be backing up your os/system drive a lot more than your data/samples folder because it's easier for any little tweak or os upgrade to upset the apple cart and stop things working smoothly. A data/samples folder is much more static. You install once to a location and it doesn't change. Even if the drive goes kaput you can just download the data/samples again from the manufacturer and reinstall. Having data/samples coupled with os/system files means backups take longer - much longer. It just makes no sense. A 250GB SSD with half the space used up on it can be backed up in 10 minutes to another SSD drive. Good luck with backing up probably close to 1TB of data in one go! Just a couple of reasons there...

Really, OS/System/Apps/Programs _AND_ Data/Samples/Presets/Expansions, is where the great divide takes place when setting up a good working computer. I mean, sure, you can install another drive just for 'Libraries' if you have gone nutty buying every Spitfire 'expansion' for Kontakt on the planet, and if you have bought every BFD3 expansion in existence. Might make sense. Then, if you have a load of your own work or even 3rd party stuff like sample CD's that you like to sample from, you could set up another drive and call that 'Samples'. Whatever works for your particular use case organisation wise is fine and only you know what that is. But executable files and programs MUST be decoupled from data and the like. It's an important distinction.

If you really want to get serious about it then there is a further distinction, and this is the end result - the music that you make. It's not a program, it IS data, but it's not any old 'data'. And for this you really want a separate drive labeled 'Music'. If you only back up one drive - this is the one! You can always reinstall programs, you can always download and reinstall sample packs, but you can never replace your precious music if you only have it in one place and it gets messed up. Back to backups...


It's up to you to work out through practice and common sense, what needs to go where. Little used stuff and stuff that can be easily replaced if a drive crashes (packs/expansions) work just fine off an external USB3 SSD. If you use stuff a lot more and need a bit quicker response, then a dedicated Samples SSD is better. Best of all would be keeping everything on the boot drive itself, but as we all know you run out of space quickly when you add up more than a few decent sized libraries like Komplete and BFD3 and Arturia's stuff etc. etc. etc. (and there is still the aforementioned problem of things becoming unwieldy for backup purposes).

Enough musing.

Here is a link to the program you need to create Symbolic/Hard Links:
https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlink...extension.html

There's many options. It seems intimidating but in practice it's quite easy. I've managed to get everything working by using Symbolic Links so far.

1: Identify the folder you want to move to save space.
2: Copy the folder to the new destination/drive.
3: Delete the folder from the original source (making sure it's backed up).
4: Right click on the new moved folder and select 'Pick Link Source'.
5: Right click in the folder space where the old folder was and select 'Drop Link As' from the menu.
6: Select 'Symbolic Link' or 'Hard Link' as appropriate.

That now creates a shortcut that will be identical to the program calling it as if it was the very folder itself. If you double click on this 'shortcut' it in fact tells you it is on the C: drive, but it is in fact on your external SSD (or wtf you put it). If you right click on the 'shortcut' and select 'Properties' you will see the folder is actually empty in size.

I've probably not explained it very well. All the info you need is in that link. Just back stuff up and experiment and it will click with you.

So, don't move apps/plugins.

Move or relocate whatever you can if the program allows you to change the path, even after initial installation. Sometimes it will allow you to move the plugin itself.

If you don't have that option, then use Symbolic/Hard Linking to relocate folders to wherever suits you, all the while the app/plugin/program being none the wiser.

It's even possible to re-arrange your VST plugins folder in Ableton using shortcuts as a kind of 'alias' or 'link'. That way you can include plugins in different VST directories (as Live only gives you the option of having one VST location, plus VST3, of course). Some programs like Samplitude allow you to add as many locations as you like.

One day I'll try the Symbolic Linking thing for plugins as well to help organise stuff, but this is as far as I've got for now.