Free Up Major Hard Drive Space with Symbolic Links for Windows
Recently my SSD hard drive (Drive C:\) was running very low on space, and I didn't feel like going through the long freakin process of reinstalling the operating system from scratch, then reinstalling the APPS and games again.
I have a custom GTAIV installation where I customized the world, installed custom guns, cars, sounds, you name it. All these GTA mods took awhile to complete, and if I have to rebuild my Windows installation, I would have to go through the horror of re-doing my GTA install.
Luckily, I once again found an ingenious solution to my problems. This time around the solution is called Symbolic Links!
Symbolic links are basically glorified shortcuts. They allow you to move a folder to another location, even if it's on another hard drive and the best part is that you don't have to reinstall anything.
By using a symbolic link I was able to move my entire 16GB GTAIV installation folder from my C Drive to my M Drive.
The command is "mklink" , and you should open up a command prompt window with administrator privileges to use it. I always type the command name then a question mark to get the usage details directly from Windows.
Here's a great video tutorial showing you how you can free up space on your hard drive using a symbolic link. By the way, there's more detailed information on the YouTube video in the description if you're interested. This works on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista, and I think Windows XP if you're still using it.
VIDEO: Symbolic Links
Why Should You Create Symbolic Links?
• Move large files or folders to another drive without going through the dreaded uninstall and reinstall process.
• It's a very fast way to free up space!
• Free up space on any Hard drive with low space. It's especially useful if you are running a solid state hard drive { SSD} as your drive C:\.
• Sync Folders with multiple computers such as media folders, photos, movies, Dropbox, etc.
