[SOLVED] Need help to recover Steam games during to motherboard died.

[Alexoferith]

Hi, I wonder if anyone can help me. Last Monday, my PC wouldn't boot up. I could get into the BIOS but just would load Win 7. Anyway, after lots of emails and hair pulling, the new CMOS battery and PSU didn't help. Even though one of the GPUs (SLI) were found to be faulty as it caused my daughter's PC not booting up, with the good GPU (tested ok in my daughter's PC), my system wouldn't boot. Painfully, I had to replace the motherboard and CPU. To cut a long story short, my updated rig is now up and running with Win 10. I had backup all my drives every month using Acronis. My question is that can I just restore the Steam folders back on to this updated rig after I installed Steam software. Your help is greatly appreciated. I only have a copper wire internet. There is no fibre optics in this area for 14 years!!! Again, thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Lutfij]

If you have the game installs on a drive that are physically there(and not corrupt) then you can assign the Steam app to find the game library/directory and avoid you from downloading the game from scratch. Read here.

 

[Alexoferith]

Thank you very much for your quick response. Oh, dear. The driver that Steam was installed was wiped clean when installing Win 10. Hence my question about whether I can restore the Steam folders from my backup image after I install Steam software which I haven't done yet with this upgraded rig. Many thanks for your assistance.

 

[eXPedient Demise]

You should be able to mount/explore the backup image and just export what you want from that.
So install Acronis on your new installed OS, then access the backup images.

 

[Alexoferith]

You should be able to mount/explore the backup image and just export what you want from that.
So install Acronis on your new installed OS, then access the backup images.

Thank you very much for your response. Yes, I know that I can browse backup image. My question is about recovering Steam games. Do I need to copy the entire Steam folder from the backup image or just the Steamapps folder will do? Many thanks for your help.

 

[eXPedient Demise]

Install fresh copy of Steam. Then copy the SteamApps folder from your backup.. Next time you run Steam, it should pickup the games - they'll probably each do a small update but otherwise you should be good to go

 

[Alexoferith]

Install fresh copy of Steam. Then copy the SteamApps folder from your backup.. Next time you run Steam, it should pickup the games - they'll probably each do a small update but otherwise you should be good to go

Thank you very much for your help. It is now up and running. After installing Steam, I copied the Steamapps folder, just that one, onto my system. It took over 20 hours!!! I started on Tuesday afternoon around 3:30 pm. The copying was completed at around 1 pm today. I thought, well, I guess the files of those uninstalled games are still there. Have to check. I think I will put up a piece of advice here for other users. Don't use the PC while restoring files. It definitely will severely slow down the process. I was installing software, updating here and there. In my case, the backup drive is mechanical which also gives rise to slower processing.

 

[eXPedient Demise]

Yeah, the SteamApps folder gets rather large depending on what games you had installed And pulling them from any form of backup introduces a bottleneck while it extracts as well, so not a fast process. But still, probably faster than downloading all the games again