I fail to see the point of the steam backup option

Soldato
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why is it there if the game can just be re downloaded anyway, unless there is something i'm missing.

what i'd really like is a way to back-up all your steam game saves in one click considering if i want to back up my 13 games i have to hunt around the c drive to find them as they are never in the same place.
 
Re-downloading all my steam games would take weeks. Backup is there to keep the downloaded files in place so they may be restored later. I've found that simply copying across the steam folder does the job just as well though, and quicker.
 
For me on a 50mb connection backup is pointless. Especially when my steam folder is 200GB.

Quicker to just download it all again.
 
why is it there if the game can just be re downloaded anyway, unless there is something i'm missing.

what i'd really like is a way to back-up all your steam game saves in one click considering if i want to back up my 13 games i have to hunt around the c drive to find them as they are never in the same place.

You are aware that:
a) Downloading a 15gb game takes forever, i don't care how fast your connection is.
b) People have bandwidth restrictions.
c) If you need to format or whatever, downloading an ENTIRE folder of steam games will take days or weeks.
d) the official steam back-up option alloys you to combine the entire steam folder into 1 folder that can be seperated depending on the size of the media you want to store it on, though no-one uses it since its prone to crashing.
 
Lets say I want to install GTA IV on my second computer,
Instead of DLing at 400kB/s, the backup is written at the HDD's speed,
Then I can transfer (just barely) on my 16GB SDHC memory card at 12,000kB/s

to me its as simple as
400kB/s vs 12,000kB/s (Transferring Backup)
Time of writing backup + Transferring backup to other PC is lightning compared to DLing the whole thing.

its useful. Its the equivalent of downloading on a 96 megabit connection
 
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You are aware that:
a) Downloading a 15gb game takes forever, i don't care how fast your connection is.
b) People have bandwidth restrictions.
c) If you need to format or whatever, downloading an ENTIRE folder of steam games will take days or weeks.
d) the official steam back-up option alloys you to combine the entire steam folder into 1 folder that can be seperated depending on the size of the media you want to store it on, though no-one uses it since its prone to crashing.

sorry but 15gig takes less than 10 mins here... only thing this falls short on is drm games with install limits
 
but, you can just copy the files and it works again, which makes the "backup" feature a bit pointless :X

Exactly, the backup process takes ages to write the games into one file I think, whereas you can just copy the whole steam folder. I actually install steam on a drive separate from my OS drive, and just reinstall steam and point it back to it's own folder, sorts itself out and no copying needed at all.
 
sorry but 15gig takes less than 10 mins here... only thing this falls short on is drm games with install limits

i'm on 50mb too and downloading is pretty quick so i also don't see much point in it.


do drm install limits apply to steam games aswell, i thought using steam avoided that ?
 
What happens when the servers are busy, downloading is running slow, you hit your traffic management etc.
Its a good option to have, but then, I store all the data onb my server so I can copy it back over on my Gigabit ethernet 25x faster than you can even hope to download it at :p
 
50 mb here but i still use the back up option, individual games are easy and quick to download but if i needed to reinstall all my collection its just quicker from the backup
 
I've never used it, but I cannot justify doubling the usage of my current steam folder (if it's a 1:1 backup?) and this is coming from someone with 4.5TB of storage.
 
The backup utility is pretty lame nowadays.

Was handy back in the day when HDD space was not soo cheap and drives were not as big.

I remember backing up to dual layer DVD's.
 
For me on a 50mb connection backup is pointless. Especially when my steam folder is 200GB.

Quicker to just download it all again.

Well, even if you needed to download it all again, it would take around 8 hours to download that lot - assuming you got maximum speed. Just a 15GB game would take around 45 minutes (and around 6 hours for me!) Restoring a backup would be much quicker.

I wouldn't use the steam backup system though - I just copy out the steamapps folder to somewhere safe. I do have a 3TB NAS to keep my backups on, though, so hard disk space is more readily available than bandwidth (especially since I have an 80GB monthly cap, and 1/10th your download speed).
 
Well, even if you needed to download it all again, it would take around 8 hours to download that lot - assuming you got maximum speed. Just a 15GB game would take around 45 minutes (and around 6 hours for me!) Restoring a backup would be much quicker.

I wouldn't use the steam backup system though - I just copy out the steamapps folder to somewhere safe. I do have a 3TB NAS to keep my backups on, though, so hard disk space is more readily available than bandwidth (especially since I have an 80GB monthly cap, and 1/10th your download speed).

Surely you won't want to play all 200GB of games straight away when you re-install?
 
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