Games Backup Zips Save Space
The major benefit of this is that the games are now compressed into a .csd zip format, which uses less disk space compared to the original game folder, although, the amount saved varies between games.
‘No Man’s Sky’ for example, has an install folder of about 8.87GB, but its backup size is only 8.48GB, whereas ‘Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes’ has an install folder of 817MB, but a much smaller backup size of only 173MB.
While ‘No Man’s Sky’ didn’t save us that much space, I guess it all adds up in the end, especially when your library gets as large as mine.
Sure, I can just copy the Steam game folders across to another computer as is, but then I’d need another expensive Seagate IronWolf 8TB Hard Drive ($149.99), where as, if I zipped them into a backup, I can get away with a smaller and cheaper Seagate IronWolf 4TB Performance Hard Drive ($129.03), which I can then store off location, such as a friend or family member’s home, in the event that my home is struck with a burglar or fire/water damage.
You can also keep a second backup drive at the same location, for easy access in case you need to restore a game for any reason.
Ok now that we know why, let’s get into how to back up our Steam Game files.
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Why backup your Steam Games
As with any data, having a backup is essential if the data is important to you. We live in an online world with millions of viruses, malware, and backdoors everywhere. Ransomware is has increased at an alarming rate as well.
Steam even recently had serious backdoors in its code, so nothing is 100% safe.
If you have a lot of Steam games, you must make sure to have and offline backup just in case something happens to your main hard drive, such as it being infected, breaking/corrupting, being stolen, or even damaged due to fire or water.
If this ever happens and you have a backup, you will be able to just copy and install this backup of your games to another new drive, without the need to redownload all your games again.
This might have no relevance to you if you have a fast, uncapped internet account or only own a few games in your Steam library, as you can simply redownload all the games again.
However, using myself as an example, even though I have an uncapped 50MB fibre line, but I also have close on 8TB of games. So, although I have uncapped internet, I also don’t want to be flagged as a major download ‘abuser’ by my ISP, for redownloading 8TB of data in a month.
I had to spread it out over a few months the first time round, so want to try now go through all that again. Haha!
Games Backup Zips Save Space
The major benefit of this is that the games are now compressed into a .csd zip format, which uses less disk space compared to the original game folder, although, the amount saved varies between games.
‘No Man’s Sky’ for example, has an install folder of about 8.87GB, but its backup size is only 8.48GB, whereas ‘Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes’ has an install folder of 817MB, but a much smaller backup size of only 173MB.
While ‘No Man’s Sky’ didn’t save us that much space, I guess it all adds up in the end, especially when your library gets as large as mine.
Sure, I can just copy the Steam game folders across to another computer as is, but then I’d need another expensive Seagate IronWolf 8TB Hard Drive ($149.99), where as, if I zipped them into a backup, I can get away with a smaller and cheaper Seagate IronWolf 4TB Performance Hard Drive ($129.03), which I can then store off location, such as a friend or family member’s home, in the event that my home is struck with a burglar or fire/water damage.
You can also keep a second backup drive at the same location, for easy access in case you need to restore a game for any reason.
Ok now that we know why, let’s get into how to back up our Steam Game files.
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How to back up our Steam Games
Steam allows you to backup any or multiple games by ‘RIGHT CLICKING’ the game, then selecting ‘BACKUP GAME FILE’ from the popup menu.
Here another popup window will appear, where Steam asks you to select another other games you’d like to add to the back-up selection.
Once you are happy with your choices, click ‘NEXT’.
Steam will now ask you where you’d like to store this backup, which is by default, C:\Program Files\Steam\Backups, but you can naturally select anywhere, such as an external hard drive or another drive on your computer.
Clicking ‘NEXT’ again, Steam will ask you to name the backup, which is by default the name of the game/s your are backup up. I usually leave this as is, as I see no reason to change the names, but you can if you’d like to.
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Splitting Game Backups
Below this, you will be able to select what file size you’d like the back-up file/s to be. You can select CD size (640MB), which is now an outdated option, as this was obviously designed to fit perfectly on a CD back in the days that CD’s were used for storage backup.
The second option is the same, but with a DVD and the last is a custom size, where you can select any file size you’d like.
Note that certain storage volumes, such as FAT32, have a size limit of 4GB, while other volumes, such as exFAT and NTFS don’t have these limitations. However this won’t be an issue here, as Steam actually created multiple 1GB zip files, instead of one large zip file as I’ll explain shortly.
Depending on the file size you choose, Steam will tell you how many folders it’s going to make for the backup of the game/s you selected. So if your game/s are let’s say 10GB in total and you select the DVD option of 4.7GB per zip file, Steam will create 3 folders, labeled ‘Disk_1’ (first 4.7GB), ‘Disk_2 (second 4.7GB)’ and ‘Disk_3’ (remaining files).
Each of these folders, will have multiple .csd zip files in them, which are 1GB in size. The amount of zip files in each folder, will depend on how large the game is and how large you set size limit to be.
If you select any number larger than 10GB (based on the fact that your game is 8GB), it will only create one folder called ‘Disk_1’ file, with 8 x 1GB zip files.
I’d recommend this in most cases, as then all the game’s files will be in one backup folder, because it doesn’t matter if you tell Steam to backup using 5 folders or one folder, the total backup file size will remain the same.
The only reason you want to split it across multiple folders is if you are trying to backup a 50GB game, and you only have a multiple 16GB flash drives to copy it across to. In this case, set it to 15GB and Steam will divide the game up into folders of 15GB each for your convenience.
The reason I make is 15GB and not 16GB in this example, is that no storage device actually reaches its advertised amount and is usually a few percent smaller.
Once you are happy, click ‘NEXT’ again.
Steam will backup the game and once done, you can click finish or click the link to open your backup folder.
Steam will now have backed up your games into a zip file, which will be far smaller than the game folder, allowing you to easily store a backup of your games on another computer, drive or location.
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How to restore Steam backup games
Restoring the games is very easy!
Simply open your Steam client and click on the ‘STEAM’ menu button. From the drop down, click, ‘BACKUP AND RESTORE GAMES’, then select ‘RESTORE A PREVIOUS BACKUP‘.
Find the backup you’d like to restore and click next.
All done.