Please help! Steam not 'Verifying Integrity of Game Cache' anymore when restoring game from a backup

[o531]

Hi there. I was just wondering if I could have some help on an issue that's been affecting me since the Steam update last night. I'm kinda hoping it's only happening to me and that I'm doing something wrong, rather than it being a new Steam policy designed to backup games using their preferred method only or something.

I have a lot of Steam games and a very slow internet connection so when I buy a game, I always download it and then save it onto a portable hard-drive so I can re-install it in the future. I always do the following steps:

1: Download a game completely, install it. Go to steamapps/common folder, find the game I want to copy. Copy it over to my portable hard drive.

When I want to reinstall, I then:

2: Go to Steam Client, find the game, hit 'install' wait for a few MB's to download and then pause. I exit out of Steam.

3: Go to my portable hard drive, find the game, copy it all back over to steamapps/common folder and delete everything in the steamapps/download folder.

4: Reopen Steam and then click on 'Verify Integrity of Game Cache'.

5: Depending on the size of the game, this will take a few minutes/upto 25 minutes and increase in increments, from 1%, 2%, 3% etc...

I have been doing this for months and it has always worked fine for me and many others and much more reliably then Steam's own backup utility which is known to mess up.

Since last night, however, this does not work at all. When I put the game back in the steamapps/common folder and then click on 'Verify Integrity of Game Cache' it will jump from 0% to 100% in a second... basically not even checking anything at all. It will then continue to download the game as normal, even with the full file sitting there. It doesn't recognise all the new files that are steamapps/common folder.

What's more, I have noticed another error, even if you don't reinstall a game this way.

Click 'install' on any game that you don't have already have installed. Download 50MB's or something small like that. Pause it and then exit out of Steam Client, go to the steamapps/downloads folder and delete everything that has downloaded. Reopen steam and click 'Verify Integrity of Game Cache'... again it will jump from 0% to 100% without recognising that there are a whole bunch of files that are now missing. Nor will it attempt to redownload them. It will just continue from where it left off.

So I am just wondering if I could have some help. Am I alone with this, or is it happening to other people as well? If it's only me, what can I do to fix it? Or is Verifying Game Cache also messed up for other people?

Thanks for any help.

 

[o531]

Why not use the built-in 'backup and restore' facility that Steam has?

Because it hasn't been very reliable for me and I've lost games in the past by using it, or have had to redownload games that I backed up anyway.

Copying games from the steamapps/common folder has always worked without any problems until yesterday. It just won't verify the integrity of game cache at all. I even tried doing the test outlined above, where I tried downloading a few MB's of a game, exiting Steam, deleting everything in the download folder, and then opening up Steam and verifying the game cache once more. It doesn't recognise that files have been deleted at all. It just continues as if nothing ever happened.

 

[o531]

You're doing it wrong.

Copy the entire SteamApps folder in C:/Steam or wherever you've installed Steam to your portable drive. Then, after you've reformatted and reinstalled Steam make sure it's not running and drag the SteamApps folder in to the Steam directory.

Next time you open Steam it will verify all your game files and automagically "just work".

Okay, sure, I'll try and give this another try The only problem I am having is that Steam just ain't verifying anything properly on my PC at the moment. As long as I'm the only one having this problem, that's kinda good news. I would hate to have wasted hundreds of hours downloading stuff that won't be recognised by Steam anymore.

I've failed to "restore" backups done with "Backup and Restore Games" tool many times and with 70kb/s download speed I can't afford to have to re-download 100s of GBs of games again!

Precisely this for me as well! My download speeds aren't quite as bad (I get around 400kb/s) but a 10gb download will take something like 8 hours at least. Frustrating! Having it backed up on a portable hard drive and being able to restore from there has always been a godsend for me.

Luckily, I've been able to pass my message onto a Valve employee through Reddit so maybe I'll find out more.