Moving and running specific CrossOver bottle on external drive
Games today are getting very large. You can change the default CrossOver bottles location entirely. But having the option to move specific CrossOver bottles to an external drive is also great. Sometimes you will want some bottles to take advantage of the super fast internal SSDs, while the others in the external drive for the space it needs.
Here’s a quick guide how to do it.
Moving the CrossOver bottle to an external drive
Firstly, move the bottle of choice to your external disk. You can find the bottles in ~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles. To get there, just use Finder and use the Go To Folder… command and paste the path in. The folder is hidden so you can just find it as per normal in Finder.
Remember to quit CrossOver just to be sure.
You should now see all your bottles. Move the one you intend run on the external disk. In my case, I will be moving the Steam bottle to my external SSD drive.
Using Symlink to create an alias to the CrossOver bottle on external drive
As the header says, the trick is to simply use a symbolic link to create an alias to the CrossOver bottle on the external drive. You would be using the ln -s <source> <target> command to do so.
Here’s an example of mine. You will need to change it accordingly of course to the actual paths on your Mac.
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/CrossOver/Bottles ln -s /Volumes/ExtremeSSD/Bottles/Steam Steam
Running CrossOver bottles on external drive
If all goes well, the bottle will function just as normal. Only the loading time will be slowed down based on the transfer speed of your external drive. I recommend using a fast one that runs on at least USB 3.1 or better yet, a thunderbolt interface. I’m using the Sandisk Extreme SSD that can read/write close to 900+MB/S. Nothing compared to the internal SSD, but fast enough.
On the first run, macOS will require you to allow the bottle’s executable to gain access to removable volumes. Just click OK. After that, the game will run. In my case, Steam loads just like normal.
This trick also works for other CrossOver dependent apps like Heroic Launcher. I have tested this and was able to run a game when the bottle is linked to external drive.
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