backing up steam
- Thread starter Davros
- Start date
if you brave to gamble, just reinstall windows and trust steam to "resume" the downloaded files (it will say downloading but runs very fast).
use steam backup to be 100% sure.
Basically games with their installation location is saved as steam manifest files will works fine after windows blow up. Other games wont. Unfortunately many many games dont use the manifest. Games from valve (portal, l4d, etc) use manifest.
*this is based on personal experience with not so many steam games (because most of them i download with steam then put a no-steam patch, so its always works) and my last game is Ori the blind forest.
use steam backup to be 100% sure.
Basically games with their installation location is saved as steam manifest files will works fine after windows blow up. Other games wont. Unfortunately many many games dont use the manifest. Games from valve (portal, l4d, etc) use manifest.
*this is based on personal experience with not so many steam games (because most of them i download with steam then put a no-steam patch, so its always works) and my last game is Ori the blind forest.
I left my Steam on D drive and re-installed Windows on C. After that I just installed Steam into the same location on drive D as previously and all my games were there there without re-downloading.
I also share the same Steam between my dual boot W7 and W8.1 as both OSes link to Steam on drive D it works without problems
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Steam's own backup function is teh suck. Seriously. It's super bad. If you have a LOT of games to backup you have to click a LOT of little checkboxes, one for each game; there's no "select all" button, filtering function, search box and so on. Also, list is not alphabetically sorted, so just a jumble of games in whichever order. And the listview is a tiny little window that doesn't fit very many games at a time, causing a lot of squinting and scrolling if you have a high-res display due to Valve's love of tiny fonts in their GUI...
Second, backup may hang indefinitely at any point during the process (known, years-old bug which Valve, despite swimming in money has never bothered to fix). It is also super slow, possibly because it doesn't support multiple cores/threads; it maxes out one core and bottlenecks in a serious way, making many hundred gigabyte-sized backups take humongously long time to complete, assuming it actually ever does complete.
Then, on top of everything else, if you need to restore just one game from a large backup, you'll find every single game is highlighted, and you need to manually unselect every single one you don't want restored (again, list is pretty much randomized, so you need to scroll and read that tiny listview carefully.)
Or this is the way it worked last I tried to use it around the time when I was about to install Win8 for the first time on my new rig. Maybe they have finally fixed their shit, I dunno, but considering how long backup has been the way I just described I somehow doubt it. Heh.
I'd recommend @Lightman's method just for the ease of it (it's fast, and tends to just plain work), but then you don't get any uninstall option in the control panel for your games, or any shortcuts inserted into your start screen/menu, if that's the kind of thing you like... Bit crap, really, but what can you do?
@orangpelupa If you try to install your undetected games again it might be that steam will detect the files are there, and just finish up the install for you. Have you tried this?
@Grall yeah tried that and steam cleverly deleted my whole game installation data -___-
luckily i still have the "no steam" version on other folder so i just copy that back on my Win 7 instalation and tell steam to "verify local data".
it was like that for Ori and the blind. I dont really remember for my other games. But im pretty sure i played L4D2 fine on W10 without steam fussing about.
then finally i succeed "injecting" Ori into W10 by cutting the files into steam's "downloading" folder and then "manually setting" the download progress save file into correct total bytes. or something like that. It was a real pain making Ori runs on W10 with steam (without redownload).
btw on the other hand, Origin works totally fine in new OS, different drives, etc. heck it works fine when i copy-paste games from PC to laptop. Origin will say downloading but it will runs with HDD speed. Unfortunately this wont work while offline.
EDIT:
i just realized why my HDD filled up.. i kept too many game duplicates lol.
luckily i still have the "no steam" version on other folder so i just copy that back on my Win 7 instalation and tell steam to "verify local data".
it was like that for Ori and the blind. I dont really remember for my other games. But im pretty sure i played L4D2 fine on W10 without steam fussing about.
then finally i succeed "injecting" Ori into W10 by cutting the files into steam's "downloading" folder and then "manually setting" the download progress save file into correct total bytes. or something like that. It was a real pain making Ori runs on W10 with steam (without redownload).
btw on the other hand, Origin works totally fine in new OS, different drives, etc. heck it works fine when i copy-paste games from PC to laptop. Origin will say downloading but it will runs with HDD speed. Unfortunately this wont work while offline.
EDIT:
i just realized why my HDD filled up.. i kept too many game duplicates lol.
Thought so.
Wow nice the dark times of steam undetected games is over.
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