Does Steam store any saves in main folder?

Vertigo

Vertigo

Vertigo

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28 Dec 2003
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I want to stop backing up my main Steam folder as it's huge and there's no point since I can re-download the games if I need to.

My concern is that I obviously want to backup savegames (configs don't matter so much). I know most games store such data in the My Documents or My Games folders but is this a rule? Can I safely assume there'll be no savegame data in the main folder?
 
You don't really need to backup steam. Just make sure steam is installed on a drive other than where windows is installed and if it ever comes to a situation where you need to do a clean install of windows you can do that and then just click on the steam exe and it will work straight from there
 
Drizmod said:
You don't really need to backup steam. Just make sure steam is installed on a drive other than where windows is installed and if it ever comes to a situation where you need to do a clean install of windows you can do that and then just click on the steam exe and it will work straight from there
Click to expand...

Yes I know I don't need to back it up as I can re-download everything if I lose it. I just want to know if, by omitting the main Steam folder, I risk losing any game saves if the drive fails and I've not backed it up.
 
I have done about 5 clean reinstalls of Windows in last few months and every time just copy over the saves from the my documents folder, seems to be fine for usually 30 games I have. Games themselves are always deleted (thankful for fast internet!) as I always change my file structure, but the saved data files have no issue.

Not had a problem with losing data or saves by not copying from elsewhere.
 
Well I backup a full image of my C: drive so anything in my profile folders will be safe, just want to put the steam library on another drive that isn't backed up. From what I can tell I should be safe with this.
 
Tupro said:
ah right.. hopefully i remember that if i do a fresh install too :p
Click to expand...

You can check by going into the games Properties screen on Steam, clicking the Updates tab and seeing if it shows Steam Cloud there. If it doesn't, the game doesn't support it. It's mostly going to be older games that don't though.
 
I copied all my game saves in my documents but forgot that some games also save files inside steam so when I reinstalled on a new drive some worked and others didn't.

I think the files are located in Steam/userdata
 
some games save locally(in various locations not just steam userdata) and some cloud. Your best bet is to just check with each individual game tedious but will get your saves secured at least.
 
Just put steam on a non-windows drive, and change your My Documents location to the same drive. Now when you reinstall Windows, Steam won't be affected and neither will your Documents folder that normally hosts the non-cloud saves.
 
If you're talking about savegames then where they're stored depends on the game and doesn't have anything to do with Steam other than the Cloud and even that has to be enabled.

Bethesda games store their saves in My Documents\My Games
 
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