Steam restore

So - I bought all my game backups with me, and I'm trying to install it. It prompts me fine, I click 'restore xxxxxx'. I left this for a while on my laptop, leaving it to restore.

At this point I ought to say that I'm on a roaming plan on my 3G, but the roaming data has limits.

And when Steam insists on re-downloading the games that I have a backup of in full, and you leave the computer unattended for a while, it ends up blowing past those limits. So doing a few rough sums, to play a ******* game I'm probably going to be hit for about £400 - £600 at the end of this month in terms of excess WWAN charges, before I realised what Steam was doing and shut it down.

I've now uninstalled Steam as every time the laptop boots up and I crank up the 3G, it tries to download all my games again.

How the hell do I restore from my backups? Not just in terms of telling Steam I own the games but in terms of the actual gigabytes of game data?

Yours ragingly,
Vogelbung.

 

Can you disconnect from the 3G while steam does its thing in offline mode?

 

How did you do the backups?

This is the easiest method, and the one I used successfully to not re-download everything for my Envy that I had on my desktop (I just didn't do the "uninstall" step on the desktop, everything's peachy): https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

Did you read this article on backups and how to restore them? If you didn't, do so. If it doesn't work, then there's a chance your original backup wasn't created right (if that's how you did it): https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8794-YPHV-2033

 

I've had this problem before. Usually means the backup is corrupted. No easy way around it asides from download install, or redoing the backup.

 

Try starting Steam in Offline mode, and running your backup then.

 

Doesn't work that way. I wish it does though. Always have to be online to install the backup, but no need to for backing up :/

 

In the second link, the Creating a Backup - yes - I did that. The backup is sized for DVD's and there are several folders - Folder 1 contains an executable to restore.

 

So I'm back and it doesn't matter anymore, but I just had an idea and tried copying everything from the external drive to the local SSD. It restored.

So solved - I know what to do now.

 

I just copy the entire Steam folder to an external Drive then copy it back. Problem solved!

 

what about other folders where a game saves data etc? will the programs recreate them?

 

I personally have never had any luck using Steam's backup feature. I just copy the steamapps folder as outlined here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

 

I forgot to mention those. The last time I copied over the entire Steam folder, I also copied over the save folders too. Most of them were in the Mydocuments folder. I noticed that Steam updated its own Client to work because I went from a 32 bit to a 64 bit Operating System too.

 

yeah sometimes games save stuff in wierd places like users/appdata/roaming and other places too.
do i have to copy these also or would they be automatically generated by the application?

 

You should copy those over too, if you don't then any game progress will be lost from what I remember.

 

BTW, I was out by almost 400%.

~£2600 excess roaming data charges for March, directly attributable to the game download.

Am I aiming to have it reduced?

 

The STEAM backup feature has always worked for me. I've used it a few times to backup really large games that would take forever to download anew. STEAM was probably just re-downloading some files for the games you restored, probably patches and updates.

 

No - the download percentages were in the single digits when I looked and shut everything down.

 

0% of downloading a new patch maybe?

 

have steam not start with windows launch?