Question:
We teach a course on game design and use the Unreal Engine. We have an issue in that the Editor and Engine install is on our partition of the drive that is locked, so when students or the instructor wants to install an update it does not hold because the drive where the app is installed is locked. We do have a partition that is unlocked and that is where students work from and save to. Since I’ve already installed Unreal on our locked drive I tried dragging all the files in the Users>Shared folder (on a Mac) to the unlocked partition but in some cases the app still sees the files in the locked drive. Even though I changed the Vault Cache location… So now I have files all over the place and would like to start over…. what is the best way to delete files and install the app on our unlocked drive.
From experience on Windows, and I am sure results on a Mac would be similar, simply copying the installed Engine from one drive or partition to another generally does not work very well. I am guessing that you have installed the Epic Games Launcher, and from there installed the binary version of the Engine, correct? What you are most likely going to want to do is to completely delete all of the files that you copied to the unlocked partition, and restart the computer. Once the computer is back up, open the Launcher and uninstall any currently installed Engine versions.
A recent update to the Launcher (2.12.19) added the ability to specify an installation location for the Engine other than the same location where the Launcher is installed. If you have this version of the Launcher or later (the current version is 2.12.22), you can have the Launcher installed in the locked partition, and install the Engine to the unlocked partition. I believe that should probably work fine for you.