How to move game files to another Xbox One.
Xbox One games are huge. Red Dead Redemption 2 is only 107 GB. If you are on a data cap, downloading the same game multiple times is wasteful. Instead, transfer your games between consoles using external drives to save data.
Copy your games to save time and data
When you give someone a new Xbox One, we recommend that you first install games for them. Whether it’s a Christmas surprise for your kids or a birthday present for your spouse, your games will be ready to play right out of the box. When you play an Xbox game for the first time, the console immediately ejects most of the disc onto the hard drive. Your Xbox then downloads everything else it needs to play. Incredibly, that extra content can lead to games that are 100GB or larger, like Final Fantasy 15, Gears of War 4, and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
If you have more than one Xbox One, installing your games on each one could mean downloading them multiple times, but depending on your internet speed, it can take a long time. Worse yet, if you have a data cap, you risk going overboard. For example, Comcast imposes a data limit of 1 TB (1000 GB), and downloading a single Xbox One game can use one-tenth of that. Thankfully, Microsoft added external hard drive support for Xbox One. And while you’d normally use it to expand storage, you can also use it to move or copy a game from one Xbox to another.
This is also useful if you are upgrading to an Xbox One X from an original Xbox One or Xbox One S.
How to transfer all games at once (or just some)
Transferring your games is a fairly straightforward affair. First, plug in your external drive you plan to use and format if prompted.
Warning: The formatting process will erase the data on the drive.
Microsoft requires that you use a USB 3.0 drive with at least 256 GB of storage. Given the size of the games, we recommend getting .
From the Xbox home screen, press the Xbox button on your controller (the circular button with the Xbox logo that lights up). Choose the Settings cog on the far right, followed by “Settings.”
Select “System” and then “Storage”.
Here, you will select the hard drive your games currently reside on. If you have never used an external hard drive before, you will select the Internal option. We will choose the “xbox” hard drive.
In the submenu that appears, choose the “Transfer” option.
Select individual games you want to transfer or choose “Select All” to transfer all games. Choose “Copy Selected” to copy the game files to the external drive. You can use “Move Selected” to move game files to the external drive and remove the source copy from its original location, but you only want to do this if you’re freeing up space, such as an entire internal hard drive.
You may notice that the top of the screen indicates that the games will be transferred to your internal drive, but don’t worry about that. The next step prompts you for a destination.
Select the drive you want to transfer your games to. In this case, we choose an empty external hard drive named “External2”.
You will see a confirmation detailing the number of games to transfer. If the information is correct, select “Copy” or “Move”. The option that is displayed depends on your previous choices. If you used the “Copy” option, your games would exist on both the destination drive and the source drive. If you used “Move”, your games will be deleted from the source drive and moved to the destination drive. Please check your options before proceeding.
The Xbox One will begin to copy or move the game files to the external drive. However, you will not see a confirmation or progress bar. If you press the Xbox button, you should see the transfer of the first game.
Depending on the number of games you are transferring and the speed of your external storage device, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. To check if games are still being transferred, go to “My games & apps”.
Select “Queue” in the sidebar. If you have games left to transfer, they will be displayed here
Depending on the speed of your external storage and your Internet connection, copying your games from one drive to another may be faster than downloading them again. But more importantly, you’ll avoid going over a data cap if you have one.
