Valve Game Files Backup

[jonathan_phang]

Hi All,

Last night, against my better judgement, I bought the silver package from valve online. To be honest, i think that i should have just got the boxed one to have a hard copy but thats impulse buying for you.

Im about 82% of HL2 downloaded and ive heard that you can backup the downloaded game files. Has anyone done this yet? Is it a decent utility. Comments would be appreciated. Also, does it just stash the files on the DVD, or is there a full installer, like on the retail DVD version?

I ask because I always reformat my drive pretty much every 6 months or so and will i be able to install off the burned DVD time again? Finally, i know that you have to activate HL2 before playing but - again due to reformatting - does this have to be done everytime you reinstall?

Thanks in advance peeps!

JOP

[directhex]

the backup facility when i used it (last week) was _HIGHLY_ unstable.

first of all, you can either create 640mb or 4.5gb compressed chunks. for the entire steam silver pack, that's 8 cds or 2 dvds. steam crashed during creation of the dvd sized files, though, after 2 hours and 4.4gb of processing. instead, i created the cd set and spread the resulting files onto 2 dvds, to restore. this is where the other problem appeared - steam crashed on file 8 of 8 during the restore. i went manually into the steamapps folder, and renamed the ~filename.gcf.bak files to filename.gcf - since it had only died on the very last file, this more or less worked (steam decided it was 98% complete on hl2 when i reconnected to it).

the backup program will only run on a pc which already has steam installed, but at 600k, you can just stick that on the backup medium.

and no, there's no need to re-activate hl2 again, you just need to make sure the cache is on 100% and that you enter offline mode whilst logged onto a hl2-happy steam account.

[jonathan_phang]

Thanks for the info there. I may wait until they release a steam update for the backup util then, as im not really planning to reformat any time soon, and ive still gotta download the other apps too. Youd think that valve would try to get this right, to save all us steam-buyers hassle, seeing as we dont have a dvd!