Best way to back-up Steam games?

TheVoice

TheVoice

TheVoice

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Looking for some advice here: I'm moving to a new house with 2Mbps internet soon, which is going to make downloading stuff from Steam a little more painful. As such, I'm looking to download a number of games in my Steam library whilst I still have a fast(er) connection.

My intention is to download them and put them straight onto an external HDD as I don't have the space on my actual system for them right now. What would be the best way to do this? I've tried Steam's own 'Backup and Restore Games' facility in the past with GTA4 and a few others, and it failed miserably to import the actual files and ended up wanting to download the entire game again.

Is there a better method that will work properly?
 
Copy and paste the steam apps folder or games from it and then put them back in afterwards? Has worked for me in the past, should just need to verify the cache when you put it back into the steamapps folder and off you go.
 
Murray said:
Copy and paste the steam apps folder or games from it and then put them back in afterwards? Has worked for me in the past, should just need to verify the cache when you put it back into the steamapps folder and off you go.
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This is the method I use, works fine
 
You can also use the Steam backup and restore option if you want a little more control over what you backup rather than everything in the steamapps folder. Its in the "Steam" dropdown.
 
So just copy the entire folder for each game I want to back-up? Sounds simple enough!

pieplough said:
You can also use the Steam backup and restore option if you want a little more control over what you backup rather than everything in the steamapps folder. Its in the "Steam" dropdown.
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Unfortunately that was what I'd tried before and it failed to work, wanted to download the entire game again.
 
As has been mentioned, just copy the steamapps folder to an external HDD.

I did it recently for around 70 or so games, and only had to re-download something like 4 of them once everything was copied back.
 
Just copy the entire Steam folder. No need to copy the individual steamapps folders. I just have Steam sat on a separate hard drive and don't bother doing anything with it between reinstalls.

I swear that this question comes up once per week. Search ftw.
 
if steam cloud is enabled you're ok for that. i've just upgraded OS, steam was installed on a different drive in the same system, not on the OS partition. I ran the steam exe, it repaired the install and everything worked fine!
 
TheVoice said:
So just copy the entire folder for each game I want to back-up? Sounds simple enough!



Unfortunately that was what I'd tried before and it failed to work, wanted to download the entire game again.
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How long ago did you try the backup/restore method? I'm on 1Mbps internet here and it has worked perfectly recently (GTA IV).

I used to have the same problem as you where it would try download the whole game again, but no problems now.
 
FrenchTart said:
Just copy the entire Steam folder. No need to copy the individual steamapps folders. I just have Steam sat on a separate hard drive and don't bother doing anything with it between reinstalls.

I swear that this question comes up once per week. Search ftw.
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If you'd read my question, you'd see I didn't want to back-up everything, just selected games so I don't have to download them later. Hence my asking.

Craig321 said:
How long ago did you try the backup/restore method? I'm on 1Mbps internet here and it has worked perfectly recently (GTA IV).

I used to have the same problem as you where it would try download the whole game again, but no problems now.
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Early this year I think.
 
Should just be able to copy individual game folders within Steam folder. Has worked for me for a few games at least. Also backup and restore feature has worked fine in the past for me.
 
TheVoice said:
So just copy the entire folder for each game I want to back-up? Sounds simple enough!

Unfortunately that was what I'd tried before and it failed to work, wanted to download the entire game again.
Click to expand...

Not sure what went wrong for you then, its worked perfectly for me, once I install a game for the first time I back it up straight away so I wont need to DL again.

FrenchTart said:
Fair enough. Reading fail on my part.
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YOU SUCK! :p :D
 
Just checked my steam apps folder its topping 750gb and i dont fancy moving it anywhere.
Only another 430gb left on a mirrored raid to burn and if it gets near to full i'll up to 3TB.
 
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