A digital distribution service owned by Valve Corporation. Originally created to distribute Valve's own games, Steam has since become the de facto standard for digital distribution of PC games.
Im getting a new computer this week and i really dont want to have to re download all my games on steam. How do i go about moving all my games to my external drive?
@Jackel2072: I just did this last weekend, steam has a back up feature where it compresses all your game files and creates a .exe so you can extract them all back onto your new drive. You can get to this by right clicking on any of your games in the library and selecting back up game files... and following instructions. However be warned I had 40+ steam games and it took over 2 hours to do the backup in the first place and when i went to reinstall them all at once I gave up after about 5hrs of nothing much happening! in the end I had to do them 2 or three at a time which worked a lot better BUT be warned again, this process only backs up saved games for games that use cloud saves (basically valve games only) so to keep your progress you need to find the save game files for each of your games and back them up seperately (they are normally found in the my documents folder in a folder in the name of the developer).
In retrospect I would have simply made a copy of the steam apps folder (program files/steam/steam apps) and copied it across once I'd reinstalled steam and done the same with game saves once I'd copied that folder as I don't think the steam back up facility is worth the hastle if you've got a large amount of games (200gb) and enough space on an external drive to store them.
What I do is make a copy of the steamapps folder. Then with Steam reinstalled, initiate download of the games, pause that download, and copy/paste the backup into its respective folder in the new drive. If you do this correctly, once you resume download Steam will verify that you have all the files for the game and won't download anything. Do this for all the games you've backed up.
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