Help Backup of data

[Bahumat]

Howdy,

I have a 250gb IDE hard drive in my main pc...yes yes I know, that's old school!

The plan is to buy a nice big fat Sata drive, install Windows 7 on and then use the IDE hard drive as a slave. I'll then copy over DAoC and my music.

The only other thing I want to copy across is my Steam games. I am unsure how to do this and I do not want to re-download everything unless I have to.

I noticed Steam has a "Backup Game" facility. I have never used this.

Do any of you know how best I can transfer the data? I was unsure if I can just copy the Steam folder onto the other pc?

 

[Noc0de]

I'm pretty sure you can just copy the steam directory as we've done this at LAN's to prevent us having to re-download game content etc (e.g. purchase the game via steam store, then copy mates directory for that game within their steam folder).

The backup facility within steam (in my mind) seems to be for backing it up to optical media instead... You could still probably do it that way to another IDE disk if you felt more comfortable.

 

[Bahumat]

Thanks Noc0de - but one more question if you dont mind

When you copy the steam folder from person A's pc (lets say yours) to person B's (lets say me). What happens when I run steam and log in as me? I know there is a Bahumat folder within steam that contains steamapps etc, so does steam just find the games still?

or are you copying the game folder within the steam directory into your friends directory?

 

[Bahumat]

Not sure if I am making much sense so will try and explain

Your game (for example) is installed here:
c:\windows\steam\noc0de\steamapps\counterstrike-source

Are you copying the counterstrike-source folder into;
c:\windows\steam\bahumat\steamapps\


Or do you just copy the whole c:\windows\steam folder onto my pc, then when I log in, Steam does some magic and everything works?

 

[Noc0de]

I think it's fairly straightforward from what I can remember and is as simple as copying the contents of the 'steamapps' folder from one PC to another, or the particular game folder.

This might help: Moving a Steam Installation

...and for reference: Using the Steam Backup Feature

 

[Bahumat]

Thanks Noc0de!