Storing steam games on DVD

The Black Hunter

My internet cap is a horrible awful thing, as is my download speed, so I was wondering if there was any way to store a steam game off my computer because space is getting tight

Zxerol

1. Right-click on a game in your Steam library and select "Backup game files"
2. Select all the game you want to backup, the location to temporarily store the backup, the size of the backup chunks (e.g. DVD), and filename.
3. Wait for Steam to compress and split the backup into neat little chunks.
4. Burn the resulting DISK folders onto your medial, move them to an external hard drive, or whatever else you want to do.

When you want to restore the backups, you just run the install .exe that the backup process creates. Voila.

Movitz

And if the games install but the game manager still starts downloading afterward, don't panic immediately. It does that sometimes for maybe 15 min, I guess it does some validation or downloads replacements for corrupt files.

If it continues, please do panic.

Ruckus

Movitz wrote: »

And if the games install but the game manager still starts downloading afterward, don't panic immediately. It does that sometimes for maybe 15 min, I guess it does some validation or downloads replacements for corrupt files.

If it continues, please do panic.

It's just steam verifying the steam cache. My understanding is that it's just communicating with the Steam servers to verify that all the files are the core game files are the correct size, version, and the game is registered to that account (thus preventing hacking, illegal modding, or pirating). It probably does checksum too.

ashridah

I've had some terrible experiences with the steam backup feature for really large collections of games (like > 20. Mine is now 110+). My advice is to store the games in individual steam backups.

Unless they've fixed things in the last year or so, restoring from a large backup of lots of games takes forever, and downloads half of the games anyway, particularly on slower connections. It seems to go a lot faster for individual backups (but that, of course, is a giant pain). Whenever i've done it, it seems to set all of the games to 'keep game up to date' immediately, which causes steam to start trying to download every single game at the same time. Very annoying.
Individual backup restores from a single or 2-3 game per backup go much faster, however.