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Steam is a digital distribution service owned by Valve. Originally created to distribute its own games, Steam has since expanded to become the de facto standard for digital distribution of PC games, and supports community features, downloadable content and achievements. Starting 2010, Steam now offers Mac games as well.

Question about where my steam saves are at.

#1 Posted by Gregomasta (1540 posts) - 7 months, 6 days ago

Ok, So I'm planning to format my desktop pc and reinstall my windows operating system. Fresh install. I got about 100 installed steam games, you know, in the computah. My problems is I have saves that I don't wanna lose, skyrim for one. Now I figure some games use cloud saving but not every game. My question is, are my saves for every game all in the Steam>steamapps>common folder?

#2 Posted by CornBREDX (3465 posts) - 7 months, 6 days ago

Ya, all the games files are in those folders. Pretty sure the saves are as well.  
Some may be in your %appdata% as well (if you have windows 7 just do a search in the start menu search bar for %appdata% and hit enter- look for the folders for certain games there).

#3 Posted by believer258 (8173 posts) - 7 months, 6 days ago

Not all of them. Some are in the Steamapps folder, some are in My Games, some are in Saved games. I suggesting looking in all of those places and copying them all to an external drive.

#4 Posted by rickyyo (23 posts) - 7 months, 6 days ago

There are saves in the userdata folder in the steam directory as well. Those are encrypted and obfuscated for a reason. They protect the integrity of achievements. So, you wont know what they go to unless you do some detective work.

#5 Edited by Mendelson9 (330 posts) - 7 months, 6 days ago
#6 Posted by Gregomasta (1540 posts) - 7 months, 6 days ago

Thanks for the answers guys! I had a feeling I was gonna have to do some detective work tracking down all my saves.

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