My computer has a virus and thus far I’ve been unable to get rid of the damn thing. I’m almost at the point where I’m going to blow the thing away and reload the OS (my gaming OS is Windows 7) from scratch. Going to be a pain in the ass, since I don’t have a recovery CD. That’s what I get for not taking the time to do security on my own systems (like the cobbler’s kid not having shoes :p). What I need to know is if there is a way I can copy the Steam games and saved game files so I don’t have to download all my games from scratch.
It’s actually amazingly simple. You just copy whatever game folders you want to save out of the /steam/steamapps/ directory (or just copy the whole folder) and then put them back after you reinstall steam. It’s the same procedure as moving a steam install to a different hard drive.
That isn’t entirely true. Games on Steam put saved game files all over the place. A bunch are in My Documents. Another bunch are in the Steam folder. I even have some stuffed in %appdata%. Backing up saved games is a real mess.
Though I imagine if you get everything from those three locations, you’ll have everything since there isn’t really any place else to put things.
While this is true, this isn’t steam related - if a game stores its savegames in my documents then all versions (steam/retail/other) will do the same thing. But yes it’s helpful to have a backup of my documents (including the my games directory) for that sort of stuff.
Whenever I do an OS reinstall I just copy the whole my documents folder to the new my documents folder.
Cool, thanks for the replies…appreciated. And thanks for the link to the previous thread on this DT…not sure why I didn’t see that when I did a search. I think I’m going to take the plunge next week since I have some off time (was planning to play Skyrim but c’est la vie) so it will be a real help if I can save the games and at least the saves for my favorite games (and mods for games I’ve modded heavily like Fallout).
BTW, ya’lls advice worked like a charm. The only problem was that I didn’t turn off Steam when I did the copy from my saved Steamapps directory, so now a bunch of the games are listed as Paused in the download. But, at least wrt Skyrim, simply clicking on the game does a quick install and then everything comes back as it was, including all of my saved games. I haven’t tried anything else, but I presume they will work the same (and if not I can always just download them again…Skyrim was my priority and it works great).
Thanks everyone! Appreciate it.
ETA, it’s funny…the only thing not working right is my iTunes. I have a ton of Audible.com books loaded, and they all show up in iTunes, but I can’t copy any of them to the iPod or iPad…only play them on the computer. I’ll probably have to re-download my entire book collection, unfortunately.
I’d check with audible.com and see if there’s another solution before going that far. It may be some sort of authorization thing. I know that, with iTunes itself, you can deauthorize all computers–I hear a lot of people do that when reinstalling the OS.
