Here’s a quick post for those looking to change the location of the downloads folder in Google Chrome. You may want to do this for many different reasons, but for most people, it’s probably because you are running out of space on your local hard drive. I moved my downloads folder to my NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. Since it’s on the network and always connected, I don’t have to worry about it suddenly getting disconnected.
I’ll talk about what happens if you do change the location to an external hard drive that can occasionally become disconnected. First let me show you how to actually change the download location in Chrome. First, click on the wrench icon at the top right and click on Settings.
Then scroll down to the bottom and click on Show advanced settings.
Now scroll down more until you get to the Downloads section.
Go ahead and click on the Change button and choose a new location. Like I mentioned before, you can choose an external drive, a shared folder, a network drive, etc to save the downloads too. There really is no restriction. Now if the download target suddenly disappears, i.e. you unplug the external hard drive, etc, then what happens?
Well, I was hoping that it would default back to the default location when you first install Chrome, but it doesn’t. Instead, the Save As dialog pops up and you have to choose a new location for the file.
And that’s pretty much it! If you have any other questions about Chrome, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!
