Do Steam Backups actually work?

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Soldato
Joined
29 Dec 2009
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About to reformat but need to backup steam.

If I use Steams own "Backup and Restore Games" and select the entire library (77GB worth) will it actually work?

The reason I ask is earlier this year I tried to backup MW2 and MW2 Multiplayer and when it came to restoring the backup it had only installed MW2.
 
You can do it manually by just copying your entire steam directory to a safe location, that's what I always do. I've not had to reinstall a game on steam due to a format in over seven years.

As an aside, my Steam folder is 247GB, and the oldest file modification date that I can find is September 2006 :D
 
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Been having trouble manually copying the folder over. It won't detect the files are there and will continue downloading them.
i.e.
1. Copy /steamapps/ to D:
2. Reformat C:
3. Install Steam
4. Copy /steamapps/ back to C:
5. Click "Install Game"

Is this the correct way? ^
 
just copy the entire steam folder, EXE and all, then copy it back when you've installed windows, then reinstall steam to that directory (or don't, you can just run steam.exe if you like) and it should detect that they're all there.
 
YarwoodUK said:
Been having trouble manually copying the folder over. It won't detect the files are there and will continue downloading them.
i.e.
1. Copy /steamapps/ to D:
2. Reformat C:
3. Install Steam
4. Copy /steamapps/ back to C:
5. Click "Install Game"

Is this the correct way? ^
Click to expand...

Not quite but you are close. I personally never use their back up function as I do the following manually and it works.

1) Install the latest Steam and make sure that it is NOT running. (Look in your Task Manager as the icon isn't always visible in the System tray)
2) Extract backed up Steam folder over the newly installed Steam area.
3) Delete the platform.gcf file in the steam\apps folder.
4) Restart Steam and login using my Steam account details.
5) Steam will now update itself again to the latest version and all your apps should still be there.
 
Dont know if your planning on replaying any single player games but remember back those up as well they are usually in different places in my documents and app data and so on.
 
the steam backup in built utility is fairly pants tbh, much better to move the files about yourself tbh

fyi f2p games can be annoying and need redownloading in several steps :|
 
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