transfer sims 4 to hard drive, tips?

Hi, I was wondering if you could help me. I have literally no storage left on my laptop (The sims 4 takes up 54GB) so plan to move it to my external hard drive. Could you possibly tell me more on where the move thing is? I tried moving the sims 4 to my external hard drive but it says Origin cannot download this on a  root directory (dunno what that means). Do I uninstall the sims and Origin, or just the sims? How do I get it to redownload in my external Hard drive?

Thanks in advance!

@Lucycatshaw  When you install an application onto any hard drive, you usually need to install it into a folder.  You can't install it directly on the drive, which is referred to as the "root directory."  That goes for both internal and external drives.  So for example, you can't install Sims 4 to the directory D:\ (as in, just on the D drive with no folder), but you can install it into D:\Origin Games, or D:\Games on My External, or whatever you want.

Within Origin, you can right-click on the icon of a game you've installed and select Move, then choose the destination, and Origin will copy over the files and adjust the other related data accordingly.  But again, you need to create a folder into which the game will go.

If the Move function doesn't work, then yes, you'll need to download it again, this time directly to the external.

Hello! I came across this thread and wondered if you could expand anymore on how I would be able to move all of my documents/saves to an external hard drive? I tried to do this and it doesn’t work. I have extremely low storage on my laptop, so whilst having my games saved locally shouldn’t normally be an issue it is for me. 

@sashacampbell199  It's not a good idea to move Documents in its entirety to your external hard drive unless you absolutely never plan to disconnect that drive, which kind of defeats the purpose of having one in the first place.  But you can use a symbolic link to move your Sims 4 user data folder (the one in Documents\Electronic Arts) to the external drive if you want.  Here's a useful guide:

https://crinrict.com/blog/2020/02/moving-windows-documents-folder-to-external-drive-via-symbolic-link.html

If you have questions about the process, feel free to ask.  But it should work fine as long as you follow the instructions.  Be sure to make a backup copy of the user data folder beforehand, or at least your essential files.

Wait what did you do to have it stop redownloading to documents cause I've been trying to figure that out for two days 

@BruisingEmu1 

If Origin created content in the Sims 4 folder despite you having a symbolic link to an external drive it will be because said drive were not connected when you started the game or it was assigned another drive letter. The latter may happen when you add or remove other external storage.

Hey there, do you also have any idea how to do it on a Mac?

@cherryyjung  If you mean storing the Sims 4 user folder externally on a Mac, please see the first post of this thread:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/-Creating-a-symlink-in-macOS-to-store-the-Sims-4-folder-on-an/td-p/12329439

If you need more help with that process, please post in that thread.

If you're looking to store the game's installed files on an external drive, that's as simple as directing Origin to install on the external.

Since this thread is somewhat old, I'll lock it here.