The following instructions lets you change the location where Ollama stores it's model/LLM blobs. This is especially handy when running Ollama in a VM on Proxmox and you only want to backup the VM bootdisk with all settings and NOT the big disk that stores the models. The default location on linux is "/usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models".

In this example we use the directory /mnt/llm as the new target. In my case this is an extra drive of 128GB in Proxmox.

Make Ollama the owner of the new directory

chown ollama /mnt/llm -R

chgrp ollama /mnt/llm -R

Stop Ollama

systemctl stop ollama.service

Edit the Ollama startup services

systemctl edit ollama.service

When first editing the service, there is no [Service] entry yet. Enter the following lines to the service, after the first 2 remarked lines and before the remark that says "Lines below this comment will be discarded"

[Service] Environment="OLLAMA_MODELS=/mnt/llm" Environment="OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0:11434"

The last line is extra and allows Ollama to also listen on other IP addresses than local (127.0.0.1).

Start Ollama

systemctl start ollama.service