I've been a big fan of steam for a long time now. I saw potential in it when I first got it with half-life 2 and still see the joys with it when playing my games from different locations. It is so simple to access and easy to buy games (sometimes too easy) That all being said, it is not without it's issues. One of the big ones I came across was the backup/ restore feature.
Since not all of use have 2 Tbs of storage readily accessible on our computers. It is good to backup our games every once in a while. While this does not back up our save files (wish that was an option) but it does keep us from wasting gigs of our download limits from our internet connections. When many of the good games are 10+ gigs, this becomes important.
They try their best. They give you options to back up the files to sizes that will fit a DVD or CD so you can back them up the old fashioned way, so most people do that. I did as well.
Actually what I did was download a game I owned from my parent's place on their crappy computer and back it up so I could restore it on my good computer when I got home. They use maybe 2 gigs a month so I figure taking 20gigs would not be an issue. It wasn't.
10 DVDs later I was on my way home. I got home and stuck in the first DVD. It asked me which games I would like to restore. I selected them all of course. Went through allocating space, then started the restore. It asked for me to "insert disc 2" which I did, then hit enter... a few seconds later... "insert disc 2" again... hmmm....
I checked the internet, they all said, you are screwed and you should install from steam downloads. I don't like that answer. So I did what I figured would work and it did.
I created a directory in the /steam/backups/ directory and created sub directories "Disk_1", "Disk_2", etc... moved all the DVDs to their respective folders and started again. would not start at all... went to steam, noticed all the games were "download paused" so I cleared them all. clicked on the backup again and this time it worked like a charm. Ran everything to be sure and it all works fine.
For those people who hate to read;
1) create a folder in your /steam/backups/ directory to move your backups to.(eg /backups/gta4)
2) create "Disk_1", ""Disk_2", "Disk_3", etc for all the disks you have in that sub folder and move the files to those folders
3) make sure that you don't have any "download paused" in your steam library. If you do, cancel them or the restore will not work.
4) open the first disk, restore what you want and you are good to go!
Since not all of use have 2 Tbs of storage readily accessible on our computers. It is good to backup our games every once in a while. While this does not back up our save files (wish that was an option) but it does keep us from wasting gigs of our download limits from our internet connections. When many of the good games are 10+ gigs, this becomes important.
They try their best. They give you options to back up the files to sizes that will fit a DVD or CD so you can back them up the old fashioned way, so most people do that. I did as well.
Actually what I did was download a game I owned from my parent's place on their crappy computer and back it up so I could restore it on my good computer when I got home. They use maybe 2 gigs a month so I figure taking 20gigs would not be an issue. It wasn't.
10 DVDs later I was on my way home. I got home and stuck in the first DVD. It asked me which games I would like to restore. I selected them all of course. Went through allocating space, then started the restore. It asked for me to "insert disc 2" which I did, then hit enter... a few seconds later... "insert disc 2" again... hmmm....
I checked the internet, they all said, you are screwed and you should install from steam downloads. I don't like that answer. So I did what I figured would work and it did.
I created a directory in the /steam/backups/ directory and created sub directories "Disk_1", "Disk_2", etc... moved all the DVDs to their respective folders and started again. would not start at all... went to steam, noticed all the games were "download paused" so I cleared them all. clicked on the backup again and this time it worked like a charm. Ran everything to be sure and it all works fine.
For those people who hate to read;
1) create a folder in your /steam/backups/ directory to move your backups to.(eg /backups/gta4)
2) create "Disk_1", ""Disk_2", "Disk_3", etc for all the disks you have in that sub folder and move the files to those folders
3) make sure that you don't have any "download paused" in your steam library. If you do, cancel them or the restore will not work.
4) open the first disk, restore what you want and you are good to go!
