Steam Backups

[Krynn72]

Anyone know if you can some how backup steam games with only the game data? My primary hard disk is crapping out, so i'm installing windows on another drive. My steam library is stored on a separate disk and is intact, but obviously without the registry entries stream won't acknowledge the fact that they're installed. Right? I'm just trying to think of ways to avoid having to download Skyrim and a couple other games I never got around to making backup files for.

Also, anyone know where Skyrim save files are located?

 

[Viperidae]

It's all in /common or in the .gfcs. Just plop the files in the right places and tell the game to install, and steam will detect them. It's worked for me so far.

 

[Sir Phoenixx]

The Skyrim saved files are in My Documents\My Games\Skyrim.

You don't have to download your games again, after you install windows, (re)install steam and just launch the games like normal and it'll do that first run initialization thing like it did when you first installed it.

 

[Krynn72]

Horray! I knew having a separate "games drive" was smart!

I just tore apart a 1.5TB external drive so I could use the controller chip to connect my old C drive via usb and see if I could get data off of it, only to discover that either: A) this external drive hasn't worked in months, or B) I just now broke the chip somehow while ripping it apart. Nuts. Oh well, I got an internal 1.5TB drive out of it at least.

 

[Higlac]

I just back up my entire steam folder onto an external drive every couple of months. This way I can transfer things to other computers without having to wait for downloads, then just launch steam from the transferred steam folder.

 

[ríomhaire]

By game data do you mean save files or the entire game? If you mean the entire game just go to Steam and right click on the game -> backup game files.

 

[Krynn72]

Yeah but the problem is that it won't show up as installed since I'll have to reinstall steam, and thus won't be able to do that.

 

[Ennui]

I had no problem moving all my Steam files to another drive with a fresh Windows install. I pretty much just installed Steam on the fresh OS, then copied over the whole ~300gb SteamApps folder from the old install. It can be a bit funky for some of the games, but at least 95% of them worked - you just try to run or install the game and it will detect that the data is there and download anything it's missing / add registry entries etc. There were some minor hiccups as I recall but overall it went pretty smoothly and I ironed out all the kinks by trying to run the various games or verify cache or whatever. One or two of them I had to delete and redownload.

For savegames you'll probably want to look through your AppData folder (type %appdata% in Run) and My Documents.

 

[Krynn72]

Ha, all I did was install steam over the old one and when I started it everything was there. Didn't even have to try to install anything.