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Is there anyway I can move where PoL installs games to away from the home directory? I only have about 300gb partitioned for my home directory and I use it all for media (music and videos). I have 1tb for my file system though.

Not really. Not without causing issues. What you could do is make a symlink to another drive, and have that pointing to ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/

Im not sure how exactly its done correctly, but I know that you can have another file system mounted at that location above, and it SHOULD work. I cant say for sure that everything will be perfect, but I know its been done.

Hmm. Ok. If I do that do I have to move over the data or will it keep the files there but move the actual data to the file I want it in? I've never used symlink and I'm not sure how it works :P

Yes. You can actually move the whole folder to the new folder, and mount that where it came from (or symlink it) and that should work.

Ive never symlinked for something like this, but Im sure Petch knows. He will probably chime in with the best solution for you. :) Ive seen him give the answer, but Its been a while since it came up.

Well, there was a discussion about why, and partially how, use symlinks or mounts to manage disk space with PlayOnLinux (and other apps):
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/topic-9822-Changing_Default_Dir_for_Virtual_Drives.html

But I don't remember seeing really "down the earth" instructions on doing either.
One could probably detail the procedure using command line, but there may be other more "visual" ways of doing the same using different file managers, as long as they somehow support symlinks; I'm not sure what would be best.

Yeah. I could imagine there are a couple of different ways to do it. The best way I could think of would be to symlink the folder like how the PlayOnLinux Virtual Drives is just a symlink to ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/

Though, I have never actually tried it, so Im not sure how exactly to do it.

Let's give it a try:

Prerequisites:
- Some filesystem with enough disk space to store the actual content of your ~/.PlayOnLinux directory. The filesystem type used should support POSIX semantics (file rights, symlinks,...) for Wine to work correctly: ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, etc should be fine, FAT and NTFS not.

1. Be sure PlayOnLinux is not running
2. Doing some backups at that point can't hurt
3. Move ~/.PlayOnLinux to the target filesystem, using some tool that, again, preserves all POSIX filesystem semantics. Copy then remove will give you some extra safety, so I suggest:
3a. use GNU's cp -a; Say you want to move PlayOnLinux's files inside /mnt/extradisk/mysecondhome/, type
[code=console]$ cp -av ~/.PlayOnLinux /mnt/extradisk/mysecondhome/[/code] (using tar, cpio, and other unixish backup softwares should do, if you prefer using those).
3b. Once you're confident the files have been moved over, rm -rf the source directory:
[code=console]$ rm -rf ~/.PlayOnLinux[/code]
4. Put a symlink where the source was, pointing to the new location. Example, say you moved ~/.PlayOnLinux to /mnt/extradisk/mysecondhome/.PlayOnLinux, then use [code=console]$ ln -s /mnt/extradisk/mysecondhome/.PlayOnLinux ~/.PlayOnLinux[/code]

Variants (more advanced, and not detailed here):
- Move ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix instead of ~/.PlayOnLinux if you prefer moving around only the virtual drives (not installed Wine versions, resource files, temporary directory, etc.).
- Move specific virtual drives ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/PrefixName instead; This will give you more flexibility, but this can only be done after they've been created, and removal from PlayOnLinux may just remove the symlink, not the remote virtual drive, so keep in mind that creation and removal of virtual drives won't be fully automatic anymore if you go that path
- Use mount instead of symlink. The target directory should be the root directory of a new filesystem, and instead of creating a symlink, create a directory and use it as a mount point for the new filesystem. To make it permanent, add mount instructions to /etc/fstab
- (Linux only) use mount --bind instead of mount. Target directory don't need to be the root of a filesystem, but it's otherwise similar to above instructions using mount.

Edited by petch

Do you think it might be a good idea to make this a sticky? I know it doesnt come up that often, but it would at least be available if maybe just had it cross their mind?

On the pro side, I'm sure more people than we think are looking for such infos; A feature to handle this need has been in the roadmap for a long time, yet still not available.

On the cons side, this is a slightly advanced and "dangerous" procedure (it involves a rm -rf after all, but nothing that can't be handled with both eyes open). It should also be noted that until proven otherwise it's not officially endorsed, so if something breaks because of this after some PlayOnLinux upgrade (unlikely, but still), users may be on their own.

Ah. This would probably be something better suited as a feature in POL5 then.

Thanks for the code. Attempting it now. And in hindsight, I probably should have put my /home directory on the bigger harddrive and root onto the smaller one.

Edited by izberion

Excellent :)

Sorry to revive such an old post, but this is one of the only places I have found talking about this. I got it mounted correctly and and Symbolic link was created fine. How do I only store the files on the external without making a duplicate on my actual system(home)?

cheers

cheers

(In case I was being too enigmatic, how many cats do you see on the picture?)
 

One of course. The interesting thing would be to ask your cat how many it thinks there is. Lol. To bad cats can't think at that levle. He/She probly only has 20 to 50 variable meows which wouldn't be much for communication.

Hope they implement it: https://github.com/PlayOnLinux/POL-POM-4/pull/38

Edited by thecherry

What would be the equlivant macOS command for the linux command cp -av?  I was looking at (apparently) a really old man page for cp on the internet and it did not have -a listed, but when man cp in the terminal is lists -a.  Would cp -av work the same in macOS?  Any advise would be much appreciated!