VST Sound - Move to external HDD

Manual

What worked for me (on a Mac i5 with Mojave):
Briefly - I let Cubase put stuff where it wants and then move just the ‘Content’ folder* to my external HD to which I have a symbolic link in the place Cubase expects to find the Content.

*Best practice is to move the individual files within the folders and not the folders themselves. This prevents erasure of previously moved content.

In detail:
{From scratch}

  1. Let Cubase install wherever the hell it wants to. You need lots of space on your system drive to hold all the content, but we’ll free it up later.
    1.1 Make sure Cubase is working at this point, keep going. If not, you may have another problem.
  2. Move the “Content” folder (System/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Content) to your favorite HD/SDD.
  3. Delete the System/…/Content folder after you’ve safely copied it to your external drive
  4. Replace that deleted Content folder with a symbolic link how? called “Content” that points to the fresh copy of “Content” on your external drive. Simple aliases don’t seem to work. Symbolic link creation requires use of Terminal and Admin privileges - look here
  5. Boot up Cubase and see if it works.

{Upgrading existing install}
Assuming you’ve got a previous install with a symbolic link to an external drive as above:

  1. Move the symbolic link “Content” out of the System folder and onto your desktop (or somewhere else where you can find it later).
  2. Install the upgrade/full install and let Cubase install wherever it wants to (requires enough System drive space)
  3. Cubase will re-create the content folder and fill it with content, but this is in the wrong spot (System drive) so we’ll move it.
  4. Copy all of the newly installed System/…/Content/…/Files individually to their respective Content folders that are already on your external drive. Replace and apply to all.
  5. (why individually?) DO NOT simply copy folders to the external HD or it will ‘erase’ any content that wasn’t explicitly installed in the update. DO copy individual files en masse. Use Command-A to select all files in a folder and do this for each newly created folder you have in your System drive. This way existing content on the external drive is not erased.
  6. Delete the System/…/Content folder that Cubase put in during the install
  7. Drag the symbolic link Content folder from the desktop (or wherever you put it) back to the System/…/Steinberg/ location (where it was in step 1)
  8. Fire up Cubase and test.

You would think that once the symbolic link is established that the installer ought to put new content files into the symbolic link which then pushes them onto the external drive, but this didn’t work for me (a few made it, but many became aliases-to-aliases - weird), hence the little dance of the folders that has to be done post-install.

So good. It worked for me. Thanks man

Guys been messing around with all of those but ONLY old good COMMAND LINE thing worked - SYMLINK em!!! 1. Move “content” folder to external hdd 2. run terminal and
sudo ln -s “/Volumes/1TbWork/Samples/Steinberg/Content” “/Library/Application Support/Steinberg” where the first path is your external hdd path and 2-nd is basic location for Steinberg libs. U’ll need “view path bar” option enabled within the Finder’s “View” menu options - just to easen things up. To get copy-pasteable links go to your external hd where “content” folder is, highlight it and look at the path at the bottom of opened window (SEE THE PIC ATTACHED!!!), rught click “content” there in the path bar and select “copy Content as a pathname”. Now U have the path in copy/paste buffer - just paste it to the terminal command line)))