Switching steam onto another hard drive.

marc512

marc512

marc512

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I currently have steam on a very old 160GB hd and i want to put it on my other hd so i can install more games on it. ( it takes up around 140GB and thats not with HL2 games installed. )

But i dont want to redownload my content. Bandwith of 3gig a month is annoying. Is it possible just for me to install steam on the new hard drive, copy all of the game folders, put on a external HD then copy them over again into my new HD? I dont want to put my old hd in my new system. To many viruses lol.

If theres an easier way please say.
 
ah okays thanks! i asked on the steam forum and they said i should re download the content...

thanks again!
 
copying the folder over will work as others have said but i've found the built in browser in steam doesn't work properly, likely hooks into IE.
if you install steam again but point the install to the new location it will be fine.
 
Strictly speaking, the only folder you need to backup is the SteamApps folder. Copy that somewhere else, re-install Steam, then dump the folder back into the program directory. Just make sure Steam isn't open when you do it :).
 
I've copied it over to a new drive before (the whole Valve folder) and it has worked fully, including the browser, without any need to reinstall Steam.
 
deadite66 said:
copying the folder over will work as others have said but i've found the built in browser in steam doesn't work properly, likely hooks into IE.
if you install steam again but point the install to the new location it will be fine.
Click to expand...

I've never had this issue. I have my Steam folder on a different drive to my OS, and after every Windows install I just open steam.exe - works every time, no need to download/install anything :)
 
I did exactly the same thing yesterday.
Old 160GB hard drive to a new 1TB hard drive, just copied the whole Steam folder over (43GB in total) and it has worked fine so far!

Some of the saved games might be in a different folder as i found, just to let you know in case you nuke your old drive!
 
Jakstaar2007 said:
Some of the saved games might be in a different folder as i found, just to let you know in case you nuke your old drive!
Click to expand...

This is something worth noting - Steam will happily transfer about without issue however if you have third party games then some might have their save files in your My Documents folder or something instead.
 
unknownsock said:
None of you realise there is also a backup underone of the tabs? :D
Click to expand...

Waste of time and effort when you can just copy and paste the whole Steam folder surely? :p

No need to even mess around reinstalling steam, just move it and run it and everything works.

edit:
"Important:

Backups created using the Steam backup feature will not include any saved games, custom multiplayer maps or configuration files."
 
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