Backing Up Steam Library

[Fahrenheit]

I know this is super basic but I've never had my steam games survive a Windows reinstall. So I keep Steam itself on my SSD boot drive then have my game library on hdd. When ever I use the baked in steam back up all games it always hangs up and never finishes. I'm about to reinstall and i'm not really into download my 100gig library again. Is there a way I can just drag and drop the folders to get it backed up?

[orangecat]

Personally all I do is keep steam installed on a seperate HDD I never have to reinstall it or anything. If you want to back it up the best option would be right click the game and make a install copy.

[pcexplosion]

Drag the Steam apps folder to a safe location.

[Fahrenheit]

Drag the Steam apps folder to a safe location.

I tried that before but I couldn't figure out how to get Steam to see the files after the reinstall 

[skullbringer]

I tried that before but I couldn't figure out how to get Steam to see the files after the reinstall 

just copy them in the new libary, click install, and then steam will just download a few missing registry files.

[WiiManic]

As said just copy the steamapps folder.

 

When you come to play a game, hit install, and Steam goes off and finds what files it already has first. It will find all of them and download a few other files, its never over a few Mb.

I've had the same Steam library over 3 PCs so far, I just copy the big games over.

 

Works for giving games to your friends too if they can't download them themselves, assuming they own the game.

[jbr]

Yup, Origin works the same way.  Just backup the SteamApps folder.

[Fahrenheit]

thanks guys it survived the reinstall