Backing up

I'm about to format, just wanted to know some things. I have a load of games installed and don't really want to have to reinstal them all and find appropiate patches and so on as it's very time consuming.

Would it work if I were to just simply transfer the games folders & files eg. C:\program files\valve to another hard drive (D:) and then when I format C: I stuck them back in the appropiate place and just created a shortcut to the steam.exe?

Among Steam games there's also All of the Battlefield Series, all of the Call of Duty series, Doom 3, Far Cry, Painkiller, UT, UT2, UT 2003/2004, Quake 2/3, Star Wars Battlefront, Hidden and Dangerous 2, C&C Red Alert/Generals/Zero Hour, Age Of Empires, Red Faction.. well I could go on a while but you get the idea :P

Probably not with most software, as it copies stuff to the registry on installation, so you'll most probably have to reinstall them. Don't have any experience with Steam based software though, but I suspect that's the case.

If you're going to reformat, you should reinstall everything. Just creating a shortcut wouldn't work. If you wanted, you could copy the registry over along with all the files, but that would probably defeat the purpose of reinstalling!

Aww, ok.. will start the devious task of sticking everything back on shortly. Thanks for the help :D

You can backup ALL the steam games to DISC very easily. in one of the menu's is the option to backup the games, and what it does is creates an exe installer and 2 images that fit onto DVD for easy installation once you have formatted.

Its great if you like to format regularly to keep the system pristine and faster than downloading all the files again :)

Aah, great :D Thanks alot mate