Like a lot of people here I have a lot (well to me anyway) of steam games, so much so that I’m running out of hard drive space. If I delete the local content for a game will Steam save my progress or will I have to start the game from the beginning when I re-load it?
I too have had the hard drive problem (I don’t know why my laptop’s secondary drive has a bunch of smaller partitions) and had to delete and reinstall a bunch of games. Obviously if the game has the cloud storage thing (and you have it on), you’re good. Otherwise, some games delete the saves when you uninstall them and some don’t. I think it may be that games that put the saves in the “My Documents” folder survive, but the ones that are in the steam directory don’t. At any rate, you can find the saves and copy them to another folder and put them back when you reinstall.
AFAIK only those saves stored within the program files of the game would be wiped (i.e. those saves in steam/steamapps/). Most of my Steam save files are in My Documents/My Games, those would be safe. Find out where your game stores your saves and make a backup to be sure.
Good advice - how do I find out where the saves are? Is there a particular file I should look for?
If there is a folder for the game in question under “my documents” that is usually where the save files are stored.
Many of my Steam games have their saves in Documents/My Games or their own folder in Documents. If I were in your shoes, I’d look there, pick a game, back up its saves, and then delete local content via Steam to see if the originals remain untouched.
Some are in %appdata% too.
These may be helpful:
Steam Community :: Discussions - Steam forum thread on save game locations.
Save Game Locations Wiki | Fandom - savegame wiki.
Also worth noting, some games that are not Steam Cloud enabled nonetheless will save your progress off your machine. I just swapped out my PC, and found that Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (which uses Ubisoft’s network) had saved my game progress to their cloud.