Steam downloads are okay to move to a different PC? (net allowance probs)

rancid-a

rancid-a

rancid-a

Associate
Joined
10 Aug 2008
Posts
729
Location
Dewsbury
Hi guys. At the moment my new gaming PC is at my parents place. They only have a 20gb monthly allowance, where as I have unlimited net usage at my flat.
So I wanted to download my new Steam games at my flat and move them to my gaming PC. I found the following info in a Steam thread, is it pretty much true? Not really keen on the re downloading bit, I was hoping I could just copy my Steam library onto a flash drive and move it to the other PC.

Cheers

How do I move Steam from one PC (or location) to another or back up my games?
The quickest and most hassle free way to achieve this is to just copy and paste your entire Steam folder to it's new location and to then Run the Steam.exe file within it.

Sometimes when doing this, games will state that they are not installed in the list on Steam. If you click to install these games, Steam will instantly "download" them from the files you've already got and the game will be installed again.
 
yep it's literally just copy paste the folder.

then steam will validate everything once you start it up and log in.


f it says not instaleld it wil go "downloading" but then find the files and the dowenlaod will jump instantly to 100% without dling anything and install.

one of the best features of steam
 
I have an 1TB portable drive and steam is installed on it. I can run my games on any PC even if updates such as visual basic, directx etc are needed - they are done automatically when you click Play.

The only issue is with saves which are often located in in folders such as My Documents/My games on the main drive so I have to copy them on my portable drive whenever I'm done gaming.
 
You will be sent an email asking whether you authorise the new machine if you have steam guard enabled. (And if you don't why not?).
 
you may find miniscule udates are needed. i had to download 7MB to play portal2 recently when i re-installed windows. the game wouldn't even start properly so i had to validate the cache. and it was something like 5MB to play just cause2. YMMV depending on game.

also, steam updates itself once or twice a month and can be 100MB at a time. that shouldn't be a problem though.
 
While this works, and works well, I often find myself using the built-in 'backup and restore' function that Steam has.

"But why?" I hear you ask. (Or maybe its just the voices in my head...)

Files. Some games have lots of individual files, making a lot of read/write operations to copy the folders across, making it very slow. Steams' function packs all these down into a nice small number of very large multi-Gb files, which Windows handles much better when copying / transferring between disks.
 
there's an option to back up your steam games within steam. you select which games you want to back up and it kinda zips them all up into a backupfile. can just keep that on an external drive and then extract/expand on the new pc through steam, minimal updates then :)
 
Thanks guys, that's really put my mind at ease. I'm not sure if I enabled Steam Guard, but when I did set my new PC up, I got a warning saying someone in Manchester was trying to use my account and if it was me... I'm in Wakefield. I had to say yes otherwise it wouldnt have let me continued.

Just got to choose which games to play first now :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom