Move Apps to Another Drive in Windows 10

In this article, we will see how to move apps to another drive in Windows 10. If you use Windows 10 on a tablet or some other mobile device, your main drive may not have enough capacity. If you use lots of Metro/Modern apps, they can occupy considerable disk space so you might want to move them to another partition (such as an SD card) or to some external drive. Let's see how to configure Windows 10 to install apps to another partition or hard drive and save space on your system partition.

Note: The updated Settings app in Windows 10 Creators Update features a number of changes to its user interface. It brings a new category, "Apps", which provides all the options to manage your installed apps. In this article, I will use screenshots of Windows 10 build 15063.

Unlike previous Windows versions, Windows 10 comes with an option which allows you to set which drive should be used to store Modern apps.

To move apps to another drive in Windows 10, do the following.

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to System - Storage.
3. Under More storage settings on the right side, click the link Change where new content is saved.
4. On the next page, under "New apps will save to:", select a new drive or partition as shown below.

This change will be applied to all new apps you install in the future.

 

To move installed apps to another drive, do the following.

Note: Some system apps cannot be moved to another drive. They have to be stored on your system drive.

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to Apps - Apps and features.
3. On the right side, you'll see the list of the installed apps. Select the app you want to move.
4. A new button, Move, will appear under the app's name. Click on the button to see the following dialog.
5. There, select a drive to move the app to, and click on the Move button.
6. You might be prompted to remove all apps from another device which can be stored on your drive. The other apps must be deleted to be able to move apps from your current device to this drive.
7. Finally, your app will be moved.

Windows 10 will create a new folder, WindowsApp, on the target drive, and move app's folders and files there:

This can take several minutes.

You can move your apps to any internal or external drive like USB drives and SD cards. It is not possible to use mapped network drives as your new drive for apps in Windows 10. If you moved your apps to a removable drive and then disconnected that drive, then any app moved there will no longer work until the drive is connected again.