Some applications allow you to store your installation data on a secondary drive, but still place temporary or cache files on the primary drive. This can be a major issue for anyone who wants to keep their primary drive tidy. ..
Spotify is a music streaming service that you’ll eventually find taking up a lot of space on your computer. This is because Spotify caches your data so that you aren’t constantly re-streaming music off of their servers. It also serves as a way for Spotify to save bandwidth and instantly deliver your music without needing to buffer.
Windows 10 offers a way to move Spotify’s local cache data to a new location within Windows. This process is called “moving the cache.” To move the cache, you must first create a new folder on your hard drive called “Caches.” Then, you must add the following files to this folder: *.sqlite3 *.db3 *.caches Once you have added these files to your “Caches” folder, you can start moving Spotify’s local cache data to this new location. To do this, you must open Windows Explorer and navigate to the “Caches” folder. Then, you can select the “moveCacheToNewLocation” option and click on it. The process will start automatically and will take about 10 minutes. When it’s finished, you will see a message telling you that the cache has been moved to the new location.
How to Change the Location of
Spotify Data in Windows
A symbolic link is a type of directory junction. It effectively creates a mirror of your data at one file path but actually stores the data in another. A symbolic link can be used to share files between two computers.
Next, we need to open the “Spotify” folder. To do so, double-click on the “Spotify” icon on your desktop. (If you don’t have a desktop, you can open Spotify from the app store on your phone.) Inside of the “Spotify” folder, we need to find our data folder. To do so, we need to open the “data” folder. Inside of the data folder, we need to find our Spotify’s data folder. To do so, we need to open the “files” folder. Inside of the files folder, we need to find our Spotify’s data folder. To do so, we need to open the “spotify_data” folder. Inside of the spotify_data folder, we will find our Spotify’s data file. ..
This should bring up a Windows Explorer window of the AppData\Local folder within your Windows user profile location. In this list of files, find the Spotify folder and open it.
Right-click on the Data folder and select Properties. You will see that the Data folder is quite large, and you may want to move it off of your current drive and onto another. This is what we are going to do next.
To stop Spotify from running on your computer, first make sure it’s closed. Then, select the Data folder and press the Ctrl + C keys to copy it. ..
Next, open the Windows Explorer window and paste the folder where you want to move your Spotify data.
I’ve moved my data folder to D:\craig\Spotify so that it’s easier to access and manage. The Data folder here contains the same files and folders as the one in C:\Users\craig\AppData\Local\Spotify, but with a new name to make it easier to remember. ..
Next, be sure that the two folders are identical. Look inside both of them to see that you’ve fully copied all of the files properly. Once complete, go back to the original Spotify folder location (in our first Windows Explorer window at AppData\Local), select the Data folder that we just copied, and hit the Delete key to delete it.
Next, type in the following command: cd C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps Now, use the “dir” command to list all of the files and folders in that directory. Notice that the Data folder is now listed as a subfolder of AppData. To move your old Data folder to a new location, type in the following command: mv C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\Data C:\Users\username NewDataFolder ..
To create a junction in your filesystem, you would type the following command: mklink /j
mklink creates a symbolic link from the current directory to the specified location. In this example, we’re linking the current directory (C:\Users\craig\AppData\Local\Spotify) to the D:\craig\Spotify directory. ..
“It is important to enclose the folder paths in quotation marks if they contain a space.” ..
After the directory junction has been created, you’ll see a success message that says “Data folder now appears again at our original location.” The Data folder will also be at the original location, with the small shortcut icon at the bottom-left corner.
Spotify is caching music data in the original folder at your link location, but the directory junction will automatically move it to the new location and “mirror” it at the original location.
Spotify can be a great music streaming service, but if you’re a regular user it can fill up your hard drive quickly. To keep all of your data in one place, you can use this simple directory junction trick.
This same procedure can be used in many other useful scenarios, such as syncing folders to Dropbox and OneDrive.
