Steam removes my standard downloads folder on restart

Obviously what folders are you talking about first… We’re not in your head so when you talk about something make sure we can understand what you’re talking about.

1 Like

I am trying to ensure that my hard drive folder is the default installation folder

So: run/media/me/harddriveuuid/SteamLibrary

Every time I restart, that path is deleted from my download settings on Steam, and it goes back to my Steam folder under home.

OK it is not standard folder then.

Make sure your disk is mounted before you run Steam. If it is not auto mounted, or manually mounted, of course Steam will not be able to use it because it doesn’t exist.

I think the issue is that you don’t have that HDD automounted. I had to add mine to /etc/fstab.

I created a folder in /mnt called Games and I made my HDD mount to /mnt/Games (as that HDD was for games only) and SteamLibrary folder is in there.

1 Like

How could I manually add the drive to etc/fstab?

In the wiki is some info about fstab:
https://archived-wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Fstab

Personally I used Gnome Disks for this, but I don’t recommend it because you will not learn anything from it.

1 Like
  1. Make a folder in /mnt with whatever name you want, lets say “HDD2” for now.
  2. Use sudo blkid to find the UUID of your drive or partition
  3. sudo nano /etc/fstab
  4. Input:
UUID=<your UUID> /mnt/HDD2     ext4   defaults 0      0
  1. Save

Now it should automount to /mnt/HDD2 every time you boot into your computer.

If you don’t know what the above fstab stuff means, here is an example:

# <device>                                <dir>        <type> <options> <dump> <fsck>
UUID=0a3407de-014b-458b-b5c1-848e92a327a3 /mnt/HDD2     ext4   defaults   0      0

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fstab

1 Like

So say if I download games, will it take up twice the space, or is it more of a link to the drive that can be accessed?

All it does is auto mounts your HDD to a specific folder instead of self generating a folder in /run every time.

So the files won’t necessary take up space in /mnt?

No, it only takes up space in that hard drive that is mounted to the specific folder.

It’s similar to some people having a /home partition. You mount the partition or another HDD to /home, so it only takes up space in /home, it doesn’t take up space of the HDD or partition containing that mounts /.

Or if you have a partition mounted to /boot/efi. It doesn’t take up space in / or /boot.

So, i just put the /mnt folder in my Steam downloads, then the client downloads my files into the folder where the UUID is (HDD), rather than my SSD. Am I correct on this?

/run is a temporary folder that will be reset at each reboot. It’s a Linux feature.
Check also this:

You put /mnt/HDD2 to your Steam downloads, make that your primary (in Steam), and it should generate “SteamLibrary” folder, and all your games will download into /mnt/HDD2/SteamLibrary iirc. I haven’t done it in a while since I already have Steam setup on my 3 computers years ago.

(change HDD2 to what you want)

So, just a general question. How does that work? I’m pretty new to Manjaro and Linux in general.

I don’t understand this question. How does what work?

So does the mnt folder lead the files to the hard drive when you download them? Or is there something else?

Maybe it’ll be easier for you to understand this:

Think /mnt/HDD2 to be your D:\ drive on Windows. So on Windows, that HDD is mounted to the D:\ “folder”. Even in Windows, you can assign your HDDs to different letters. Whereas your main drive is C:\.

On Linux, you can technically make your HDD mount to any folder you want. Even if it’s /home/thisfolder/thatfolder/thisone/HDD2

But as long as it links to the HDDs UUID, it works similar to Windows D drive?