I just bought the Windows 7 upgrade and, since I have Windows XP, I need to do a clean install. Everything except for my saved game files are backed up. So what exactly is the best way to save all that info? All my games are part of Steam so that will probably help.
Thanks.
Why do you have to do a clean install if you bought an upgrade? 
You can upgrade Vista to 7 but if you go from XP to 7 it has to be a clean install. You can still purchase and use the upgrade disk, which has the full installation. You just can’t do an actual OS-to-new-OS upgrade.
Unless Steam has something that would work against this, you should be able to just take note of the directory or directories where the saves are located, copy the files from those directories onto a thumb drive or something, and then copy them back after the install.
A brute-force solution is to just buy a new hard drive and install W7 on it (though you’re probably looking at some $$ there). Then you configure your current drive as as a slave (or master on another channel) and just pull off whatever you need. That would mitigate against finding out that you forgot to back something up. Then when you’re comfortable with the switchover you could reformat the old disk and use it as a backup disk.
I don’t know how Steam games are saved (I thought part of the concept was to be able to play games from any machine; are the saves stored locally?) but you should be able to find that out as **Chronos ** described.
How do you have your other files backed up without having a backup for the Steam files? If you use backup software it seems like you could configure it to pick up the Steam files and then just run it.
I don’t have any backup software. I just dug around the hard drive to find stuff I didn’t want to lose and copied them over to another drive on the computer.
As of last night, I just copied the whole Steam folder to my other hard drive so I have about 15 gigs of data. I’m guessing the saved game files are somewhere in there but there is also a lot of garbage too. While searching on Google, this was the only solution I found. I didn’t really want to do that but it seems like it might be the only way.
Unfortunately, every game has a different saved game folder default location, and most won’t let you change it. some will save the games into the my games directory under my documents. Some will save in a sub directory under the game’s main directory in c:\program files. Some will do some random crazy shit like create a new directory on some random place and save there, or even occassionally in the system (usually hidden by default) folders under the “roaming” directory.
I hate this. A standard should really be agreed upon by the industry. For windows 7 it should be under a directory with the game’s name under the user’s “My games” directory. Damn it!
So you’ll have to check every game and locate the save directory and copy those files. Once you re-install the games restoring your saves can be as easy as just copying the files back to they respective directories OR as complicated as either having to run the game at least once first (so that the paths are created, or even creating a user in game whose name matches the one you used. It’s really a game by game thing. And it sucks!
Ideally, doing a clean install won’t erase anything that’s on your drive, assuming you have enough free space for the installation and choose to leave the filesystem as it is. It will just create a new Windows directory.
Several of my Valve saves are in the “My Games” folder. Make sure you copy these as well.
How is that a clean install? I thought a clean install was a disk reformat. If you can install on top of an existing system, isn’t that by definition an upgrade?