Steam is a great place for distributing 2D linear and immersive 360 game-related video content. Content must be directly related to gaming, or accessory content to games or software available on Steam. We are not currently accepting non-gaming related video content for distribution. Aug 16, 2015 - There is currently an issue where Steam Cloud Storage may not work. That their existing saves on the Cloud do not sync to the new machine.
- How To Install Steam Games
- Check Steam Cloud Saves
- How To Download Game Save From Steam Cloud Download
- How To Download Game Save From Steam Cloud Free
Steam has a built-in system for making a backup of its game files, so you don’t have to re-download a full game every time you uninstall it and want to play again later. But like a lot of Steam’s features, it hasn’t been updated in quite a while, and frankly it often manages to break the game restoration process anyway. On top of that, it’s slow, it’s clunky, and you can do better on your own.
Manually copying the files out of Steam’s game folder, then copying them back when you’re ready to play again, is much faster and more reliable. Steam’s caching system means that doing it yourself has no disadvantage versus the program’s integrated tool. If you’d like to back up your game files separately, especially to an external drive for archiving a large, 100GB+ collection or saving space on your primary system backup, here’s how to do it the easy way.
Step One: Find the Game Files
Find your standard Steam game installation folder. By default in Windows, this is located in:
In macOS, open the Finder and choose Go > Go to Folder from the menu bar, entering this path:
And in Linux-based operating systems, it’s in the following your local user directory:
This folder is divided into sub-folders, one for each game installed under Steam’s master game list. Most of them share the same name as their respective game, but some use alternate titles or abbreviations—for example, Age of Empires II HD Edition is shortened to “Age2HD.”
Remember, if you’ve set a custom game folder in Steam, your games will be installed elsewhere.
Step Two: Back Up the Games
To back up the games in the Steam common folder, just copy and paste them into another folder.
That’s it. Really, it’s that simple. Ideally, you want them to be on another storage drive, either internal or external, because having two copies of the same game on a single drive isn’t particularly useful. I keep a dedicated game partition on my external backup drive, just so I don’t have to re-download 30 gigabytes of data every time I want to play Team Fortress 2.
Now, right-click and uninstall the game in Steam to remove it from your primary drive. If your game sits in your backup folder for more than a few months, you’ll probably have to download an update to it…but that’s a few hundred megabytes at most, perhaps a gigabyte or two. Compared to almost 80 gigabytes for DOOM, it’s a great saving in both time and bandwidth.
Step Three: Restore the Games
How To Install Steam Games
Restoring the games is also easy: first, copy the game folders from your backup location back into the Steam/steamapps/common directory you found in Step One. (You might have to delete the original folder, since sometimes there are a few left over files even after a game is uninstalled.) Once that’s done, open Steam itself.
Click on the Library tab, then find one of the games you just restored to your primary Steam folder. It’s uninstalled at the moment; click “Install Game.” Make sure that it’s set to install in the same folder that you just restored your game files to.
Now here’s the magic part: before Steam begins the “download” process, it will double-check the location that it’s assigned to install the game files. Steam examines the game folder, “discovers” the files are already there, and skips the actual download for any files it doesn’t need to retrieve from the server.
Steam will restore the game in a few seconds to a few minutes. If there aren’t any major updates needed, you’re ready to play right away.
Don’t Forget Your Save Files!
There isn’t a standard location for games to put their save files. Depending on what you’re playing, your save file might be somewhere in the My Documents or My Games folder, or it could be in the game data folder you moved around in the steps above, or in the application data folders. It might be saved on the game developer’s cloud server or with Steam’s Cloud service, or in a dozen other places.
The point is, the game installation files you backed up might not also include the game save files that actually represent your personal playtime. If you’re backing up your games to access them later, do a quick Google search for your game save location to make sure you have those files protected as well.
Whether you’re switching to a new PC, reinstalling Windows, or just ensuring you don’t lose hours of gameplay if your hard drive dies, you’ll want to make sure your save games are properly backed up.
Quite a few games support save-game syncing via the cloud, but many games — especially older ones — do not. You’ll need to back up and restore their save files on your own.
Check if Cloud Syncing is Available
Cloud syncing is the ideal. If a game syncs its save files with a cloud service, it handles the backup and restore process on its own. Unless something goes wrong, the game will automatically back up your save games to the cloud and restore them to other computers, so you don’t have to worry about it.
First and foremost, you should identify if a game syncs its own saves before bothering to back up its game saves. If you’re using Steam, click the “List View” icon at the top-right corner and look for the cloud icon. Games with the cloud icon next to them use Steam Cloud to sync their saves, while games without the cloud icon do not.
Automatically Back Up Game Saves
GameSave Manager is a free program that contains a database of games and their save game locations. It can scan your computer for installed games and their associated saves, displaying them in a list. With a few clicks, you can select the games you care about and back up their save games to a single file. This file can be restored on another computer with GameSave Manager, putting all the save games back in their correct location.
Without GameSave Manager, this would require locating a game’s save files on your hard drive and backing them up manually, then restoring the individual files to their correct locations. As games scatter their saves all over your hard drive — there’s no one standard location — this can be very inconvenient and tedious.
After installing GameSave Manager, click the Make a backup option. You’ll be able to choose the installed games you want to back up.
You can also create a scheduled task that will automatically back up your game saves on a schedule. GameSave Manager can place these backed up files in a cloud storage folder, so you’ll always have a recent backup in case anything goes wrong.
Link Your Game Saves to the Cloud
Games that don’t perform cloud syncing still put their save games in a specific folder. With symbolic links, it’s possible to place your save game folders in a cloud storage folder — such as on Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive — and create a symbolic link to that new folder at the original location. This effectively tricks the game into storing its save games in a cloud storage folder, so they’ll be synced along with all your other files.
You could do this yourself by following our guide to creating symbolic links on Windows. However, GameSave Manager also includes a tool that will quickly do this for you. Just click the Sync and Link option and select the game saves you want to store in your cloud storage folder.
Manually Back Up Game Saves
If you’d like to eschew third-party tools entirely, you can back up your save files the old fashioned way. Bear in mind that different games store their save files in different locations. There are no standard locations that are universally respected. Here are some common locations where games may store their save files.
C:UsersNAMESaved GamesGAME
C:UsersNAMEDocumentsGAME
C:UsersNAMEDocumentsMy GamesGAME
C:UsersNAMEAppDataRoamingGAME
C:UsersNAMEAppDataLocalGAME
C:Program FilesGAME
C:ProgramDataGAME
C:Program FilesSteamsteamappscommonGAME
C:Program FIlesSteamUSERGAME
This isn’t a comprehensive list — not by a long shot. Some games’ save data may even be stored in the Windows registry. If you’re looking to back up a specific game, your best bet is to perform a Google search for the game’s name and “save location” to find where its save data is stored. Websites like the Save Game Locations Wiki attempt to bring all this information together in one place, but they’re not very comprehensive.
If you have a game that uses Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live, bear in mind that you’ll also need to copy your GFWL profile folder. If you copy the game’s save files without your GFWL profile, the saves may become unusable. This is just one of the many ways Microsoft’s GFWL inconveniences PC gamers.
Back up the folder from the following location, then restore the folder to the same location on the new system:
C:UsersNAMEAppDataLocalMicrosoftXLive
Check Steam Cloud Saves
We recommend you use GameSave Manager if it supports the games you want to back up — backing up save games manually can be complex and unnecessarily time-consuming.
How To Download Game Save From Steam Cloud Download
If you’re using Steam, you can also back up your Steam folder — stored in the Program Files folder by default — and move it to a new computer. All your Steam games will be present, so you won’t have to re-download them.
How To Download Game Save From Steam Cloud Free
Image Credit: Flavio Ensiki on Flickr