Does anyone bother backing up their game installs?

Vonhelmet

Vonhelmet

Vonhelmet

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Ok, so I have about 500gb of games installed on a terabyte drive and I don't fancy having to download everything all over again if something goes boobs up. I've got a second terabyte drive so I'm looking at ways of backing everything up. I was going to mirror the disks in windows (7 fwiw), but home premium doesn't support disk mirroring, so that's out. I wondered about steam's backup feature, but it looks that backs things up and renders them unusable in the meantime, which isn't what I'm after.

Am I best just picking up some free backup software and telling it to copy everything over and then keep the drives synced?
 
I must admit, I just redownload anything. It doesn't take too long on an uber broadband connection.
If I was stuck with dodgy connections I might be tempted with backing up the bigger games. BUt I still think I'd leave it downloading over night and use any extra storage sace for more games :)
 
I also redownload as my connection is pretty quick. I can't say I ever really think about backing up games, maybe the odd save game file, but that's about it.
 
I don't bother and would just do a clean install as needed tbh. It gives me peace of mind and I can re-organise at the same time.
 
Hard drives are cheap nowadays so isn't too much of a problem, if your internet connection isn't great, to back up your game installs (or anything else for that matter that would be a pain to re-download). There are tools to aid this process, from robocopy to Steam Mover, to Steam's own backup procedure.
 
Only games with custom content that goes in the game directories. Like Warcraft, Fallout's, Elder Scrolls', etc. Even then most of the time I'd just back-up the custom content folders. I'd only consider full back-ups if my internet speed was poor or if I was on a monthly cap.
 
Not anymore, save games occasionally if they don't support cloud save (Dark Souls 3 I'm looking at you!)
 
Vonhelmet said:
Ok, so I have about 500gb of games installed on a terabyte drive and I don't fancy having to download everything all over again if something goes boobs up. I've got a second terabyte drive so I'm looking at ways of backing everything up. I was going to mirror the disks in windows (7 fwiw), but home premium doesn't support disk mirroring, so that's out. I wondered about steam's backup feature, but it looks that backs things up and renders them unusable in the meantime, which isn't what I'm after.

Am I best just picking up some free backup software and telling it to copy everything over and then keep the drives synced?
Click to expand...

With Steam, you can just copy the Steam or SteamApps folder over without having to use the backup feature.

I'm not clued up on disk cloning software but could maybe look at that?

Personally I'm not too worried if my game drive gets messed up, can always re-download them when needed, even if it does take a few hours per game
 
simply copy/paste to my raid

or you could use robocopy/syncback too automate it for you

lob in batch file & setup task scheduler?
ROBOCOPY d:\ D:\

or xcopy (built into windows)

xcopy /v /e /h /r (Source) (Target)

xcopy /v /e /h /r c:\*.* d:\*.* - for example would copy the entire c drive to a d drive.

/v - verification
/e - folder's including empty one's
/h - hidden / system files
/r - read only files
 
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