Steam Backup: Stay Away

I recently formatted and reinstalled my computer. My Steam folder was over 100GB, a lot of games. Rather than making a backup copy of the Steam folder I decided to use the inbuilt steam backup. Big mistake.

The backup operation took a couple of hours, when making a simple zip wouldn’t have taken nearly as long. Once this was complete, I copied it to an external hard drive and did my format/reinstall. I installed steam and then began the backup operation. It took 18 hours to “complete”, or not. It seems it didn’t restore anything, simply recreating the Game Cache Files with no content. Excellent.

I re-ran it again with just a single game and it worked. It looks like i’m going to have to restore them one by one, not a short operation. Add to the fact there is no “uncheck all” option, and each time I uncheck one it takes ages to actually uncheck it while it recalcuates totals. Even so, some crash.

So i’ve given up, i’ve now got the prospect of downloading it all again on my pitiful 2meg connection. At least I have a 330GB offpeak allowance from my ISP…

I reccomend against using the Steam Backup option. Just ZIP or RAR your entire steam folder. Much quicker, much simpler and it WORKS.