steam backup

passingthrough

my hard drive is getting pretty full so i was wonder could i re download all my steam games to an external hard drive but also keep my saves, is this done automatically with the cloud thing or would i have to find the save games in the folders and copy them

marco_polo

passingthrough wrote: »

my hard drive is getting pretty full so i was wonder could i re download all my steam games to an external hard drive but also keep my saves, is this done automatically with the cloud thing or would i have to find the save games in the folders and copy them

Simply copy the entire steamapps folder in the Stream directory to backup all your game content (to restore you simply copy this into a fresh steam install directory if you ever need to) , only a few (mostly Valve) steamworks games have steam cloud support. So for other games you will have to find their specific save game directories and back themup as well (Usually in Document or Documents\My Games)

Overheal

Games that I'm familiar with that do cloud saves are Torchlight, Plants Vs Zombies, And most/all Valve and THQ games, including Skyrim, Space Marine, and Fallout 3

marco_polo

Overheal wrote: »

Games that I'm familiar with that do cloud saves are Torchlight, Plants Vs Zombies, And most/all Valve and THQ games, including Skyrim, Space Marine, and Fallout 3

Thats a good few more than I though, alot of devs must be patching in cloud support retrospectively?

passingthrough

sorry just another question about steam, is it possible to change where my games get downloaded so i can re download onto an external harddrive instead of my computer

marco_polo

passingthrough wrote: »

sorry just another question about steam, is it possible to change where my games get downloaded so i can re download onto an external harddrive instead of my computer

Not really, but if you use SteamMover you can move any games you are not playing currently onto an external drive (loading games over usb would be painful). Essentially it uses creates a link (junction point) between your steamapps folder and another folder.

http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover

Overheal

almost 300 games actually use SteamCloud

You can see which here: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term= click on Advanced and search by category "Steam Cloud"

TomCo

Read up on symbolic linking - google "mklink +steam".

I have my steam games split between two harddrives and regularly move games around to free up space.