[Tutorial] Moving a Unity installation to a separate drive or partition

Unity Engine
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2021 Update: With the existence of Unity Hub, this method of moving installations is irrelevant. These instructions may still be useful for those who decide for whatever reason to install Unity separately outside of using the Hub, especially older Unity versions made before the existence of Hub!

Hello guys, not sure where to actually put this, so if someone can move it, that would be great.

With that out of the way, I’m putting this here for those who for some reason need to move their unity installation to a different drive on the same PC. (This guide assumes you’re using Windows x64)

The first step is actually moving the entire install folder to the new location. Easier said than done however, as attempting to open a project may result in “nonexistent playback engines” and a few other errors/warnings in the console. I got this after moving my Unity install off the C: drive onto my D: drive so Windows 10 could update properly, (Unity was taking 3GB of space) and through trial and error (and some hints from some googling) I found how to reset all the paths after moving.

So, to the fixes: The first involves the registry; Win+R, type regedit to open the registry, navigate to the following key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Unity Technologies\Installer\Unity” (or just find the path with Ctrl+F) and in there is an entry in there called “Location x64”
Right-click, modify and type the new install directory path into Value Data. Close regedit when done.

The second thing you need to do is to navigate to C:\ProgramData\Unity (you’ll need “Show hidden files” turned on) and delete the file “index-local.xml” (This folder also where the license file is located, so be careful going into this folder!)

Now, you can open unity, and start developing again no issues. It fixed mine when I ran into that snag after moving the installation. It also makes me wonder why relative paths still aren’t a thing in some Windows programs in 2017.

Thought I’d put this out there, as the other fix is to reinstall Unity, which can take a whole lot longer. I’ll keep this post updated if I find any more cases with fixes.

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The recommended approach is to use the Unity installation process. You can have multiple versions of Unity on the same system, just install to different locations.

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This guide is for moving ONE installation to a different drive however, I don’t mention multiple installs anywhere…

I mostly wrote this for people that want to move the install folder without manually uninstalling then reinstalling again, which takes longer.

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Got it! i missed that, I guess I get caught up in installing multiple versions for testing, and overlooked the advantage of being able to move a single instance

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Awesome, thanks!

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Hope it works for you. :slight_smile:
Kinda forgot I wrote this tbh, happy someone’s able to use it.

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Thank you for sharing the solution.

A question: why would you move the existing installation folder and not re-install Unity?
I would like to move the Unity folder for a simple reason: the layouts I have, I love them and I don’t want to waste time setting them up again.

Another question: I see this “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Unity Technologies\Installer\Unity”
What about different Unity versions?

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OK, I just COPIED the Unity folder from an external drive (where I installed due to lack of space on C) to the main C drive (new arrived yesterday).
I renamed the OLD Unity folder so that it couldn’t be referred anymore by anything and launched from the new copy.
It all SEEMS to work fine.

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OK, apparently there’s no index-local.xml in the ProgramData/Unity folder at my end. (I have hidden files visible all the time)

Will it work just fine or I have to find it elsewhere?

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Thank you for lifting the curtain! Much easier than re-installing, considering I wanted my engine to be on the same drive as the rest of my projects! Thanks again!

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It could have changed as last time I wrote that, Unity 2020 didn’t exist, which version are you trying to move?
Honestly surprised this got revived as I haven’t actually worked with Unity an awful lot since 2018.
Only opened the forums today to have a peek on what was going on.

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Unity appears to be a standalone installation not tied up to any serious system files so it seem to not matter where the installation and all necessary are as long as the UNITY HUB knows where the installations are.

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I wrote this guide before Unity Hub existed, so honestly, these instructions likely aren’t applicable anymore. I’ll edit the original post.

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Hello , i followed all your step , and opened unity from unity hub , but i still got the playback error , is there any fix to this ? my unity version is 2018.3.0f2

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Edit : i deleted the index-xml in C:\ProgramData\Unity but it does not fix the problem . Re-opened unity and the index-xml does not reappear in the folder either , so i give up i uninstalled the unity 2018 editor , maybe this is the time to install unity 2021 after all.