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Using backups of games

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seamzo

I needed to reinstall steam as it has some issues so I created a folder and put all my games in it. Do I have to reinstall all my games or is there a way to use the folder with all my games in it to put the games back on steam?

11 years ago*

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5 Comments
Disturbed0ne

Did you already uninstall Steam?

11 years ago
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seamzo

Yep

11 years ago
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Disturbed0ne

If you still have your steamapps/common folder (or the entire steamapps folder and it still has all of your games in it), then you should still have all of your games. You might have to update them though.

I recently swapped all of my games from my laptop to my new desktop and rather than sit for over a month and redownload them I just used a USB drive to swap them all to my new HDD. It was only a 16GB(14.9GB usable) so it took a few hours but it was a hell of a lot faster than having to download them all again, it also saved me from going over my ISP's stupid bandwidth cap... >_<

11 years ago
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BoGG

Reinstall Steam and then copy your backed up game folder back to the Steam game folder and it should detect the games being installed on restart.. if it doesn't it should detect them when you try to install them.

11 years ago
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Uroboros

The process can be tricky, as sometimes the files don't detect and it will only download them from scratch.
I found this out the hard way after trying to manually keep the /common/ files as they were.

The easiest way is to use the in-steam backup function, where you can create a backed-up copy of a steam game specifically designed as a restorable copy, which you can then transfer onto a different HD for safe-keeping. For instance, I have an external HD where I keep backups of particularly large steam-games, to save me from having to download them again (given my ISP has a monthly data limit and doesn't have the fastest of transfer speeds). Restoring from a backup is as easy as taking the backup sub-folder it generates for you, moving it into /steam/backups/, and then running the restore function from within the steam client.

11 years ago
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Closed 11 years ago by seamzo.