I wasn’t really sure where to put this, but good enough. So I have a problem, my SSD is only 120gb. I run into space issues all the god damn time. I was backing up my games to a HDD, but it’s rather annoying. Jason told me he just copies his over to a HDD which seems to work. But still a lot of work. I figured.. why not script it!
Here’s what I got.
2 batch scrips per game.
Gonna use left 4 dead 2 as an example.
1. left 4 dead 2 BACKUP.bat
CODE:
robocopy “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2” “E:\Games\Steam\robocopybackups/left 4 dead 2” /e /mir /np
rd /s “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2”
So what this does is copy all left4dead 2 files from my steamapps folder to my HDD(E), if files are already on the HDD it only checks for modified ones. After it’s all done, it asks to delete the files off the SSD(E). It still gives a confirmation to delete.
2. left 4 dead 2 RESTORE.bat
CODE:
robocopy “E:\Games\Steam\robocopybackups/left 4 dead 2” “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2” /e /mir /np
Simple copy over, without the delete. No reason to really delete it from the HDD(E) because there is plenty of space there. I could take out the /mir I suppose.
There are a couple games I ONLY play at LANs so I can load them up real quick right before. Pretty efficient. Hope this helps some of you.
One thing to note is a huge part of the L4D2 files are not in the L4D2 directory, they are in the main steamapps directory. All of the Source engine files are there, along with some game specific stuff, and for games like TF2 or L4D2 they are gigantic.
Another option would be to use the built in Steam “Backup Game Files” option. It grabs a copy of all of your game files for that particular game and places it into a single container. That way you can be sure it has all of the game files you need and it should be just as fast as a copy if not faster as it copies over a single container file and not a billion little ones.
But you still have to uninstall the program after backing up? right?
Yes, if you want the space free. Just right click on the game and click delete local content.