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Should you back up games on steam?

A

Artista

Senior member
I am still fairly new to steam (old school physical media gamer here) and was looking through the steam client options.

One option is to back up games (to restore if needed later)

Should I do this?

If so do I just back up games I have started to play or all the games in my steam folder?

Do I back them up to another hard drive other than the one they are on?

(I assume this is mainly just in case your folder gets corrupted? Perhaps though in case the hard drive they are stored on crashes?)

Thank you
 
The only reason to back them up is to save you the bandwidth/time of downloading them again if you lose your entire drive. Any corruption can just be scanned and repaired on a per-file level.
 
I don't bother, but I also don't have a bandwidth cap. I have too many games to making backing up practical when I can't even install more then a third of the games I own.
 
I take it there is no known time limit to reinstall games. There will be one eventually, maybe after 10 or 15 years and the game has not support for modern operating systems.
 
Ferzerp said:
Steam gladly sells old games that won't work in win7/win8 so I don't see that happening.
Click to expand...

But at some point the cost of keeping the games online is going to be outweighed by the cost of storage and then they will get rid of them, maybe it will be more like 20 or 30 years as steam gets more and more games.
 
JimKiler said:
But at some point the cost of keeping the games online is going to be outweighed by the cost of storage and then they will get rid of them, maybe it will be more like 20 or 30 years as steam gets more and more games.
Click to expand...

In 2-3 years a 20Gb download will be nothing.
 
JimKiler said:
But at some point the cost of keeping the games online is going to be outweighed by the cost of storage and then they will get rid of them, maybe it will be more like 20 or 30 years as steam gets more and more games.
Click to expand...

?!?!? Becasue the cost of computing capacity gets more expensive as time goes on???

As long as they are in business I dont see them taking titles down. I could see them stop selling certain titles at some point but hosting the files for current owners would likely stay.
 
Just a FYI, but if you do backup the games, and you later install them again, you must be in 'online' mode to do that.

Now, since you can save games to different locations, the backup option isn't really needed, unless, as was mentioned, you have a slow connect, or idiotic caps.
 
The only thing I do is use GameSave Manager to save my game saves so that if I do have to re-download my steam games I can keep all my game saves.
 
It'll save you a few hundred Gigabytes of downloads in the future, so not that bad an idea. Just stick a second hard drive on your computer and copy it over.

Otherwise, I wouldn't be too worried about it.

iTunes is pretty nazi-ish when it comes to not allowing you to re-download purchases, but even they let you download stuff again with enough pleaing.
 
I back up game saves but not games.

Even with Steam Cloud, game saves can be corrupted by bugs. If you've put 30 hours into (game x), find where the saves folder is and copy it to a different hard drive or flash key.
 
You can just as easily copy the game's folder unless it's a valve game. When you copy the game's folder back and run the install, it will first check the install location for files.
 
External hard drives are cheap. Backing them up isn't required but it can save you a ton of time with reinstallation down the road. Also, if you're in a region where download caps might be an issue keeping backup copies can be a big deal.
 
I do because of stupid bandwidth limits by my ISP. Its super easy to do at least. Steam has done a great job of making it easy to backup/restore games.
 
Even without bandwidth caps and a fast Internet connection, nothing beats installing from a local hard drive. This especially matters if you are installing games to an SSD which makes it easy to run out if space.
 
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