Correct way to move a project to a new drive?

I’m fairly new to UE5 and things have been going great until I realized it defaulted to installing projects to my C drive with only a few GB left even though UE5 itself is installed to M. Oh well, no big deal, I’ll just relocate the project, right? Wrong. I’ve followed youtube tutorials, edited an .ini where the project paths are stored, I cannot get the moved project to show in UE despite being able to open it directly. “Migration” just crashes the program. What am I doing wrong?

Well I created a new blank project in the spot I wanted to move the old one to, then manually copied the Content in Windows Explorer. After opening I had to fix a bunch of errors but now everything is working correctly and my project is in the right place. Man it would be nice if there were a supported way to do this.

So, actually moving the project is literally just a matter of moving the directory; if you have Documents\<you>\Unreal Projects\MegacoolGameThing and want it to be on your D: drive, you literally just grab the MegacoolGameThing directory and drag it or cut/paste it wherever you want it to be, just like any other directory.

Getting the Epic Launcher to see the project in its new home, however, is a bit more of a headache; it will only check the directories it’s been told to, and actually finding where to add new ones is… uh… we’ll go with “an adventure”.

Grabbing my own post from elsewhere on the forum…


So, by default, the launcher will ONLY see projects in the <Documents>\Unreal Projects\ directory. This is something I find deeply annoying.

Thankfully, there is a way to change it!

On Windows, you can navigate to %LOCALAPPDATA%\EpicGamesLauncher\Saved\Config\Windows\GameUserSettings.ini and open that in a text editor. You’ll see a line in the [Launcher] section like:

CreatedProjectPaths=C:/Users/<you>/Documents/Unreal Projects

If you have things in, say, D:\Source\AwesomeGameStuff, then you can change the file to read:

CreatedProjectPaths=C:/Users/<you>/Documents/Unreal Projects
CreatedProjectPaths=D:/Source/AwesomeGameStuff

Next time you run the launcher, et voila, it will also find any projects in D:\Source\AwesomeGameStuff.

On macOS, the file you want will be ~/Library/Preferences/Unreal Engine/EpicGamesLauncher/Mac/GameUserSettings.ini – the change is otherwise the same.

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Thank you for the reply. Believe it or not I actually found that post of yours earlier today and tried your solution but Unreal still would not recognize the project in the the launchers despite editing the .ini. I definitely learned to pay attention when creating a new project.