Is it possible to backup steam games

First I needed storage equal to double my Steam Library, half for the library itself and half for the backups. I used Steam Gauge to figure out my library is 2.

Second I needed something to run all of this off of. Fortunately for me I have a homelab and a dedicated system for backing up all of my personal computers and my homelab itself. You can accomplish the same thing with any old laptop, desktop or even just use your gaming rig.

It just needs to be powerful enough to run Windows 7 or newer and Steam. While the download was happening I did some quick testing and confirmed that I can have Steam running on a second PC in my home downloading games and still use Steam on my gaming rig to play games.

Three days later my entire library was downloaded and I can get into the automation part. We need to accomplish a few things:. I set mine to run at am on Monday. This will take care of automatically starting Steam, letting updates download over the next few days. After the task was created I disabled it right click, disable.

Just right click the game in your steam library, choose "Backup game files" and then choose the USB flashdrive or SD Card as destination for the backup. After the backup is completed, deinstall the game.

Later you can restore it with the "Restore Games" function in the Steam options, if you want to play it again. Last edited by Ogami ; 26 Nov, pm. Originally posted by Ogami :. K, thanks man. I'd just copy the game folder over. Steams backup feature hasn't been the most reliable piece of software I've ever used. I suppose I've tried it across a network to NAS and had dismal results.

Stopped caring when I found how little it can actually compress. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. How does one do this? When I go to make a new steam library my DVD drive doesn't show up on the list. Most games never write to their installation directories. The much bigger problem is that optical media are much slower for random access reads than even hard disks, let alone SSDs.

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