[SOLVED] Steam + multiple partitions = game update PITA!

[Jake_UK]

Hi folks,

I have home and root on separate partitions. Steams (unused) base Library (which it won't let me remove) is on home and I have second (used) Steam library on a separate HDD. My free disk space is as follows:

Root partition: 656MB
Home partition: 1.9GB
Library HDD: 2GB

Steam is telling me it doesn't have enough free disk space to download a 738MB update for Cities: Skylines. I conclude from this that Steam is trying to download it to root rather than home or the game HDD, both of which have sufficient space. In Steam's settings there appears to be no way determine where updates downloaded to - I would have thought they would be downloaded to the default library location but the Steam devs logic is obviously different.

Has anyone else had this annoying problem? Is there anything I can do other than mess around with my partition sizes in order to accommodate this annoying behaviour from Steam?

TIA!

[rene]

Has anyone else had this annoying problem?

Since no reply can be worse than a negative one: no, and cannot reproduce. I personally have both / and /home on two separate and both small-ish SSD partitions and placed my Steam library on a large-ish HDD. Both when I fill up / and when I fill up /home to leave less than 1GiB, Steam has no issue downloading my games to the HDD library; does not seem to touch / at all, only adds a few K configuration in /home.

But, yes, downloading, which may be different from updating. I cannot however arrange for an update for one of my games to be available to test that. The only somewhat expected issue would concern the ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/downloading folder, but well, your /home also has enough space available. Still, I trust you will have "clear[ed] download cache" through the Steam client, Settings -> Download?

What I would try in your case is temporarily moving /tmp and/or /var/tmp, but have not as said been able to ascertain whether or not that's more than a random thought. But:

Code: Select all

rene@hp8k ~ $ mkdir tmp && chmod --reference /tmp tmp
rene@hp8k ~ $ sudo mount --bind /tmp tmp

and/or similar for /var/tmp. But I doubt it will help any.

[Arch_Enemy]

Hi folks,

I have home and root on separate partitions. Steams (unused) base Library (which it won't let me remove) is on home and I have second (used) Steam library on a separate HDD. My free disk space is as follows:

Root partition: 656MB
Home partition: 1.9GB
Library HDD: 2GB

Steam is telling me it doesn't have enough free disk space to download a 738MB updatefor Cities: Skylines. I conclude from this that Steam is trying to download it to root rather than home or the game HDD, both of which have sufficient space. In Steam's settings there appears to be no way determine where updates downloaded to - I would have thought they would be downloaded to the default library location but the Steam devs logic is obviously different.

Has anyone else had this annoying problem? Is there anything I can do other than mess around with my partition sizes in order to accommodate this annoying behaviour from Steam?

TIA!

Never mind...all that time in collich and I still cant reed...

[Jake_UK]

Hi folks,

Thanks for the suggestion Rene, no reply is definitely worse so thanks for your suggestion! It made me decide to 'bite the bullet' and simply booted up a Gparted LiveCD and move 500MB from /home to /. This has the added bonus of stopping Mint from nagging/reminding me I have less than 1GB of free space on any of the partitions (1GB seems to be the smallest value that can be entered in the disk space warning settings)!

However, when the update still refused to download it made me look a little further into what Steam was telling me and what it was saying was that it actually needed 3.7GB free space for the 738MB patch! On the assumption that perhaps it was downloading the 738MB patch to the partition where the game is and then also requiring further space to install it before it could then delete the patch installer I moved some files off this partition temporarily and that did the trick! So it's difficult to know for sure what it was/is doing but it does seem as though the Steam devs logic is the same as mine after all (the patch is downloaded directly to the location of the game).

Anyway, looks like this particular case was mostly 'user error' on my part, not spotting all the clues first time around! But at least I'm not nagged about my partition with <1GB free each day...

[rene]

Oh, darn. I originally misread your question wrt. the 656MB on root (you may have gotten a forum reply notification when I placed a reply that I only seconds after rereading deleted again) similarly to I believe Arch Enemy -- but what I hadn't noticed yet was that I had also misread (well, "misthought") your /home and library HDD to have respectively 1.9 and 2 TB available. Yes, googling for the issue I did notice a few reports where the Steam client needed some 4 or 5 times the actual patch size to successfully update but that didn't register then: 2TB is after all a lot more than 4 or 5 times 738MB. 2GB is not

You certainly seem to be strapped for disk-space; those were unexpected G's. But anyways... glad you got things sorted.