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Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

They've been rumored to be working on this for some time; I think it's an excellent feature. I know people who live in areas with poor internet speed, and this type of thing is a godsend. It may seem simple to people on here how to simply transfer game files or set up a network cache, but to many users it's akin to dark magic.

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Steam had an option to recover a game from a backup for a long time. If you really needed this you knew about it. This new feature seems to just save a few clicks and the need for a shared drive / flash drive.

It still doesn't help me with games releasing a 20 GB patch every 7 days unfortunately.

Yep, back around 15 years ago when I had data caps I used to use that feature all the time. Not to copy games between PCs, but to have backups in case I reinstalled Windows etc so I wouldn't have to download them again.

The feature's still there: Right-click a game in your library -> Properties -> Local Files tab -> Backup game files.

It creates sort of an installer with all the files in it. It's less useful in these days of frequent patches though, because the game will still have to download any newer updates after installing.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work so well with some larger games. I tried backing up a 120GB up-to-date game, uninstalling and reinstalling steam (to a newly purchased drive), and reloading the game from backup. It still wanted to download 90GB.

I'm one of those people. I have a gaming PC filled with games and a Steam Deck with some games. Some of the things I want to play on the Steam Deck I've yet to play just because the download would take forever (intermittent internet access combined with horrible latency and terrible bandwidth). Really happy about this feature.

I don't know, the issue I think I have is how come it took so long? GCF files are handled pretty well in Steam already, so how was this not just enabling local service discovery and serving HTTP?

For quite some time you could do this manually without much trouble, but you did need to know a few obscure steps to do it right. Basically a matter of finding the ID of the game so you can copy a certain metadata file along with the actual game data.

I used the trick to copy some games to my Steam Deck back in the Fall. I speculated then that they might make this a genuine feature since it's so simple. I'm glad to see it happened.

Steam has had a dedicated feature for this for a decade now. Except it didn't do it over the network, just files which you had to provide transport for yourself

This is different than the backup feature, behaves extremely differently. The backup feature is so insanely slow that restoring from a typical USB media a 120GB game takes longer than downloading that same game on 100mbps internet connection.

This method I'm referring to (and probably what they will codify) is much, much faster.

> I know people who live in areas with poor internet speed

Me. :)

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