Is there way to select where Brave is installed when dealing with multiple drives environment?
No, and that’s better for support. There are only two locations for Brave to install, Program Files when you run as admin, and %localappdata% when you install it without admin rights.
But, why would be the point of changing installation/updater files if the user data is still in C and would always point to C?
Well, in that case what you have to move is the User Data, not the installation files necessarily, the user data is the one that grows and is used all the time when you use your browser. You can already do that in Chromium browsers by starting the browser with --user-data-dir=
. That’s exactly what those “standalone” Vivaldi and Opera do, they start the browser like that.
Brave offers zipped versions to place them wherever you want, but they are not updatable because Brave uses the omaha updater which needs the registry to know and update the different builds.
So it all comes down to:
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If you want to have Brave updatable and be able to have the files in other drives, use junction or symbolic links, and probably install it without admin rights so all files, application, updater and user data will be in the same folder, which makes things easier.
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If you want Brave as a ‘standalone’ version, download the zipped file, and then make a shortcut with
brave.exe --user-data-dir="User Data"
or something, so it creates the User Data next to where the brave.exe file is, if not it will put the user data in the %localappdata%. The browser will not be updatable so you will have to manually download the zip and replace the old version etc etc.
So there is no way to really do it, but you can make it happen if you really want Brave files in other drives.
My machine has two drives. The bulk of my user data is on my secondary drive.