Transferring Steam games between computers?

[Glowsquid]

My desktop computer has shit the bed and we've just bough a new one. I live in Canada, land of shitty ISPs, so I'm not thrilled at the idea of redownloading what seems like 30 GBs worth of TF2 updates.

I'm buying a portable harddrive so I'm wondering if anyone here tried transfering Steam files before. Does it work with some games? Are save files usually stored in the _commons folder?

 

[Nabber]

okay so I just set up a new computer with steam and installed portal 2 and poker night 2 on it

portal 2 automatically downloaded the save data; poker night 2 didn't, so it probably varies by game

 

[Aiko Heiwa]

okay so I just set up a new computer with steam and installed portal 2 and poker night 2 on it

portal 2 automatically downloaded the save data; poker night 2 didn't, so it probably varies by game

yeah if you have games that use steam cloud, all your save data will DL

 

[Dr. Javelin]

My desktop computer has shit the bed and we've just bough a new one. I live in Canada, land of shitty ISPs, so I'm not thrilled at the idea of redownloading what seems like 30 GBs worth of TF2 updates.

Ooh, yeah. I just got back from a trip to Canada and the internet was awful.

I'm buying a portable harddrive so I'm wondering if anyone here tried transfering Steam files before. Does it work with some games? Are save files usually stored in the _commons folder?

As far as I can tell, save files are stored in different places depending on the game. Some of them stored somewhere within the game file itself (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Star Wars Battlefront II\GameData\SaveGames), but others are stored under your user account (C:\Users\Javelin\My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves). Which is kind of odd.

As for copying the games from computer to computer, I'm not so sure. The files under C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common look to be pretty contained and you theoretically should be able to simply copy/paste them from computer to computer, but it's quite possible Steam wouldn't recognize them and wouldn't show them on your list of games. Worse, many Steam games likely won't run without Steam knowing about them (just as a quick test, I copy + pasted the entire Poker Night at the Inventory game file to my desktop and tried to run it without Steam running, it wouldn't work).

EDIT: Though that likely depends on the game. Games like Battlefront II that were released outside of Steam are probably less locked into Steam and it's more likely they could run without it.

 

[Keqing]

yes, ive done so before when moving computers a year ago
its a weird process but your games should be in /Steam/SteamApps/common/ and your saves and stuff should be on steamcloud so most of the time theyll automagically reappear
so just copy that folder, move it to your new desktop
and now you have to do the really shity part
on your new desktop after moving the games, youll have to verify the intergrity of the game cache by right clicking /every/ game and viewing its properties on steam, otherwise it will automatically start downloading updates