Valve Steam titles do not save games in user's directory on Vista

[archcommus]

As most of you running Vista probably know, Vista does not allow programs to write to the Program Files directory after its initial installation, as it should be. Instead, if an application does not natively write data to a folder for the app in the user's AppData directory, Vista will reroute it there transparently under the VirtualStore directory in AppData\Local. No application is able to avoid this circumstance - except for one apparently, Steam. It seems that Steam on Vista, for Valve titles anyway, still manages to save game files in the SteamApps\user folder in Program Files, and I don't know how it's able to accomplish this without Vista rerouting it. This annoys me because my backup scheme relies on the fact that all relevant application data is in AppData, and so I only have to back up this one directory to save all that information, a great thing about Vista. Steam breaks this setup and so I have to manually copy data from Program Files to back up my save games.

So my two questions are, how does Steam get around this feature of Vista, and can I somehow force it to comply?

 

[videogames101]

Well, i'd imagine because steam stores everything in the program files folders and reguraly eneds to update/rewrite game files there that the ability to write files there was top priority for steam devs. If they did discover a hole, even if you fixed it, you'd probably no longer be able to access saved games.

 

[Cutthroat]

I install steam to a 2nd hard drive and back it up separately. This way if I re-install an OS image it doesn't affect Steam or my games. I've also moved my user folders to a different drive as well and back it up separately. I do all my backups with Acronis True Image Home, and they are all scheduled, I rarely need to touch it.

 

[archcommus]

Well, yes Steam engineers would need to work out a way to write to Program Files since that's where downloaded game data goes, however I'm surprised even that isn't re-rerouted to AppData. That's the point of Vista's folder virtualization, to completely protect Program Files and to keep all program-written data in a user-specific folder. I did not think it could be circumvented, and it's annoying that Steam is not "with the times" in keeping save games somewhere in your user path like most new games do.

Cutthroat, what kind of medium do you create your images on with Acronis that it can run on a schedule? Must be something always on like another internal hard drive or network share. I use an external HDD which is obviously not always on so I must be there to create images, which makes me not do them much.

 

[Cutthroat]

Originally posted by: archcommus
Cutthroat, what kind of medium do you create your images on with Acronis that it can run on a schedule? Must be something always on like another internal hard drive or network share. I use an external HDD which is obviously not always on so I must be there to create images, which makes me not do them much.

I use an external eSATA HDD, it's always on. The only image I do manually is the OS image because I like to do it from outside Windows with the Acronis Startup Manager.