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I have been on a mission to look for a solution of how to change the location of every file Google DFS (Drive File Stream) uses (including the DB which gets accessed more than anything). I have two hard drives on my system. One is my OS drive (C:) and one was dedicated (S:) to my cloud related application (such as DFS). When DFS runs it completely consumes my boot/application/OS drive making it a pain to do anything. As you can see, it's not even touching the drive I want it to use for the most part.

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I contacted Google support (as I'm an Admin and have the rights to in my company). The response I received from them was as expected but not welcomed...

"Indeed, moving the Drive File Stream content cache doesn't move the operational "db" and other files that are used for the application to run properly. Currently, Drive File Stream can only be installed on the "C" drive on your computer."

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Enter Symbolic Links

Well, I was determined to find a solution until they provide support for this. So with a little trial and error I finally made it over to my good ol' symbolic links. They happen to be EXACTLY what I was looking for to solve my problem. After putting one in place, I ended up with the following.

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The Solution

Note: You might want to back up the DFS directory like I did before trying this.

  1. Exit out of DFS and check Task Manager to ensure all instances of DFS are closed.
  2. Open a command prompt as an administrator, and change the directory to the path where google stores it's application files. Keeping in mind that your path will be different, or you can use "cd %localappdata%\Google" to get the correct directory.

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  1. Copy the "DriveFS" folder to your new stored location. In my case I copied "%localappdata%\Google\DriveFS" to "S:\Clouds\DriveFS".
  2. Backup the DFS application folder. I renamed mine from "%localappdata%\Google\DriveFS" to "%localappdata%\Google\DriveFS_old".
  3. Create the symbolic link itself. Using something like the command "mklink /D DriveFS S:\Clouds\DriveFS". The switch /D will create a DIRECTORY symlink. DriveFS is the folder like symlink that will be created (the name of it), and S:\Clouds\DriveFS is the new target where you want the files to be actually stored at. This needs to be changed to the place you want the files stored.

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  1. Then start up DFS again and it should perform as expected with no issues.

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