First impressions - Getting back into Steam

[Rebel44]

Portal was only ~1300MB for me.



Thanks! That's exactly what I needed to know.

With Source games those who already have some Source game installed download is much smaler than for those who dont have it.

 

[PieceOfMind]

With Source games those who already have some Source game installed download is much smaler than for those who dont have it.

Makes sense. Isn't Steam clever?

 

[Donkeyman]

2) I noticed that when I re-installed TF2 from disc that it still needed to update by downloading upwards of 1GB. How do I make sure that next time I install the game I don't need to do such a massive update? I'm assuming I can backup to disc or something like that. Can you backup to simply an ISO so I can keep it on my hard drive and not use the environmentally unfriendly p) DVDs as a storage medium?

You needed to download a massive update because Valve updates TF2 with enormous amounts of free new content frequently, and the base version of TF2 doesn't come with any of it- I doubt Civ 5 will have that much extra content patched into it at any point, so I doubt there will ever be mandatory downloads that exceed a few dozen MBs. (there is literally no point in having a copy of a multiplayer-only game like TF2 that isn't patched, since nobody will ever be able to play with you.)

 

[PieceOfMind]

Yeah, I know about the TF2 extra content thing - I've kept in the TF2 news at least minimally. That's why that question was asked about TF2 not civ5.

If I'm to be using Steam more regularly, I need to get used to how to use it and that includes backing up other games.

Regarding the size of civ5 patch downloads, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they went into the hundreds of MB. The last BtS patch was ~165MB.

 

[Donkeyman]

Just realized I didn't actually answer your question, just raved about Valve's awesome free content additions. I've never actually backed up any of my games because I really never have needed to, but Steam games are stored in exactly the same way as regular games, just in a different directory, so I'm pretty sure if you save an updated version of the game to your flash drive or other storage device of choice you wouldn't have to update it again.

But then you'd have to back it up again every time your game gets patched, and that would take a lot more time and effort than just letting Steam update for you unless you connect to the internet through your cell phone or something, unless you set up some sort of auto-backup, in which case you just lose some of your processing power to something you probably don't need to. So I think you can do what you want to do, even though I don't understand it at all.

 

[Chalks]

Just realized I didn't actually answer your question, just raved about Valve's awesome free content additions. I've never actually backed up any of my games because I really never have needed to, but Steam games are stored in exactly the same way as regular games, just in a different directory, so I'm pretty sure if you save an updated version of the game to your flash drive or other storage device of choice you wouldn't have to update it again.

But then you'd have to back it up again every time your game gets patched, and that would take a lot more time and effort unless you connect to the internet through your cell phone or something, unless you set up some sort of auto-backup, in which case you just lose some of your processing power to something you probably don't need to. So I think you can do what you want to do, even though I don't understand it at all.

Although backing up the game now would still require the downloading of any additional patches upon reinstall, it would still be a significantly smaller patch then having to download ALL the new content.

 

[Donkeyman]

Although backing up the game now would still require the downloading of any additional patches upon reinstall, it would still be a significantly smaller patch then having to download ALL the new content.

You still have to download the content in the first place though, so I'd only see this being useful if you want to install your game on multiple computers with internet slow enough to make downloading any decent-sized updates a significant chore.

 

[Chalks]

Very true - and that's certainly an argument as to why we probably won't see massive free content updates for Civ 5 due to its single player nature.

With something like TF2 you can safely assume that its players will have a decent internet connection.

 

[De Begerac]

2) I noticed that when I re-installed TF2 from disc that it still needed to update by downloading upwards of 1GB. How do I make sure that next time I install the game I don't need to do such a massive update? I'm assuming I can backup to disc or something like that. Can you backup to simply an ISO so I can keep it on my hard drive and not use the environmentally unfriendly p) DVDs as a storage medium?
3) Is there a way to simply backup the entire Steam installation, perhaps including all the game installations? I understand that one of the argued benefits of Steam is that you can redownload games as many times as you like etc. However, if I had more than a couple of games on Steam, it would be quite time consuming and download-demanding to expect that on reformating my hard drive or something that I'd have to download each game again. Do I only need to backup my steamapps folder or something along those lines?
Thanks in advance for any answers

It is possible to make a copy of your steamapps folder. Then if anything ever does happen to steam and you need to reinstall install steam copy your duplicate steamapps folder to the correct location. When your run Steam it will detect the games, say it's updating/installing (I forget which) and you should be up and running in a much shorter space of time. Of course there may be patches from after you first made your backup but it should save a lot of the legwork.

Cyrano

 

[PieceOfMind]

Donkeyman,
You seem puzzled as to why I might want to make a backup of the entire steamapps folder. The most obvious reason is if I for example wanted to reformat the partition. Doing so would wipe the registry and any number of other things that make the program work.

I'm not making regular backups in case of hard drive failure or something like that. Just one-time backups on the odd occasion.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Regarding the Steam problem I had in an earlier post: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9180669&postcount=31,
I think I have found a way to get around the bug. I can in fact reproduce the buggy behaviour with today's version of Steam very easily by running Steam in online mode, unscrewing the antenna from my wireless card, restarting steam and the problems begin.

For whatever reason, unscrewing my wireless antenna has the same effect as the internet connection dropping on the ISP's end. To fix the problem, all I have to do is disable the wireless connection. While Steam is unresponsive and trying to connect to its servers, disabling the wireless card instantly brings Steam to life again, to the dialogue box asking me if I want to go into offline mode, and this time it actually works.

So in summary, the bug is easily reproducible but it has specific circumstances in which it occurs. There is a simple way around the bug, at least in my case. If your connection has dropped with your ISP, simply go into Network Connections (on windows xp) and disable the wireless card so you can then put Steam in offline mode.

 

[Senethro]

So does the Go Offline dialogue box not even appear even if you wait for unreasonable times like 10 mins without disabling the card?

 

[PieceOfMind]

So does the Go Offline dialogue box not even appear even if you wait for unreasonable times like 10 mins without disabling the card?

I already gave these details so I'll just remind you...

After about a minute or 2 (didn't time exactly) it came up with Connection error and asked if I wanted to go into offline mode.
<snip>
This time I timed it and it took exactly 2 minutes before it realised the connection wasn't going to work and asked me about going into offline mode.
<snip>
Most importantly, once it does determine the internet is down and offers me offline mode, it doesn't even work.

Simply disabling my wireless card I was not able to reproduce the bug (i.e. Steam worked by going into offline mode, no problems). It's as if Steam is checking whether an internet connection is supposedly available rather than whether one actually is. For example, if the wireless signal is extremely poor (to the point of being unusable) or your ISP is not properly communicating data with you. These are different problems to simply disabling the wireless. Since I don't use a wired connection between computer and router, I am not sure if unplugging an ethernet cable would produce the same thing or not.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Yesterday I reformatted my system partition and so I decided to try out Steam's backup feature.

I went to create a backup and chose to include every single item that could be backed up. It amounted to 29ish GB in the end. It took a while but it worked just fine. (I put this backup on a hard disk by the way - not removable media)
However, when I went to restore that backup after the reformat, I found the restoration of the backup to be extremely slow. I don't know if it's because Steam is working really hard decompressing things or running at very very low system priority, but to restore the backup of ~29GB it took more than several hours. I don't know exactly how long it took because I had to leave it running when I went to bed.

Is it normal for restoring backups to be extremely slow? In future, I think I would rather just make a manual backup of the Steamapps folder and copy it over manually into a fresh install of Steam. I have been told that that would work just fine, though with the possibility of Steam having to verify the files.

 

[Senethro]

I've got a personal theory about that. Were any Relic games among those 29GB?

 

[PieceOfMind]

I've got a personal theory about that. Were any Relic games among those 29GB?

To my knowledge, yes: The demos for Dawn of War and Winter Assault.

What's the theory you have?

 

[Senethro]

Doesn't work if they were just demos.

Relic games have an absurdly terrible patching system involving temporarily backing up huge numbers of files. There was a point at which you needed double the hard disk space of the whole installation just to successfully complete a patch. Needless to say, it was very slow.

They aren't the speediest installers either but unless some weird decompression slowing Relic's installer down was going on, I can't think that would be whats causing your problem.

 

[Rebel44]

Yesterday I reformatted my system partition and so I decided to try out Steam's backup feature.

I went to create a backup and chose to include every single item that could be backed up. It amounted to 29ish GB in the end. It took a while but it worked just fine. (I put this backup on a hard disk by the way - not removable media)
However, when I went to restore that backup after the reformat, I found the restoration of the backup to be extremely slow. I don't know if it's because Steam is working really hard decompressing things or running at very very low system priority, but to restore the backup of ~29GB it took more than several hours. I don't know exactly how long it took because I had to leave it running when I went to bed.

Is it normal for restoring backups to be extremely slow? In future, I think I would rather just make a manual backup of the Steamapps folder and copy it over manually into a fresh install of Steam. I have been told that that would work just fine, though with the possibility of Steam having to verify the files.

For backup, I simply copy entire Steam folder to another HDD.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Yep, I'm going to do that next time.