Hacker News Reader

Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

Steam game downloads are kind of a nightmare. Their game backup compresses the game into a CD, DVD or custom format size, which can take anywhere from a few minutes for a small game to 1 hour for a large game. They provide no straightforward mechanism for you to tell if a game has been updated, and I can only assume that the file hashes aren't going to be the same if you backup the same game twice even if there are no changes.

I like to keep backups of my games, but they make it so freaking hard to keep your backups current. Really, it should be a single click of where you want your backups to go and as games get updated then only change what is necessary, not require another full backup and a 1 hour wait.

View on HN

Steam on low bandwidth is bad, too. It''ll happily keep trying and failing to download client updates (ignoring the "download window" time settings). Viasat likes to kill connections after ~10mb or so, so the thing will download the same 10mb of an update over, and over, all day long, if its allowed to.

My home internet is particularly low bandwidth, so I’ve taken to downloading my games from steam on a laptop somewhere else where I can get a 4G/5G signal and just copying the directory to my gaming computer. When it’s migrated to a new system all that’s required is a redownload of the executable

Some people merely copy their Steam directory in order to create a backup, but they do have a backup mechanism that works differently... and has some pros to it, vs simply copying your entire Steam folder.

Tried this recently, and it's a complete mess if you run low on disk space. When trying to move a 100GB game to the SSD recently it turned out that:

1) steam will not rediscover the files automatically at startup or by attempt to launch the game, nor is there any specific option

2) the existing file discovery process is instantiated by forcing a new download of the game

3) this process will not begin unless there is enough free space for the game

So in the end, I had to copy the files back to the HDD to make space on the SSD, start an install of the game on the ssd, exit steam, copy the files to the SSD again, open steam and resume download, then wait for it to verify each file.

Did you move just the folder in steamapps/common? There is also a file like steamapps/appmanifest_220.acf that tells steam the game is installed in that folder. It should detect those in all game library folders on start.

I don't know where you want to backup you games, but you can copy just the one game folder and remove the game afterwards from steam. To restore it move the folder back and "install" the game. Steam will verify the files and only download new/changed files. Should be faster the the backup option inside steam itself.

If you have a second hard drive (or maybe network drive, haven't tried) you can also create a steam library folder on that drive and just move the game to that library from within steam. That way it will still get updated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com