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Comment by Tsiklon | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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