Steam save games

[jiaco]

So instead of jumping into SeriousSam3 this morning, I awoke to a PC that just BSODed. I could hear one of my HDDs dying for a while and knew the day would come soon, so I had disks ready and even went to win7 64bit (from xp32). Install was painless, all the disks actually still worked, so transferring all the files was fine, what really sucked was having to initiate the steam install for each game, even though the files were there already. Due to steam sales, the process would fail repeatedly as the initial startup must not really check to see what is present and what needs to be downloaded.

But what really sucked was finding all the old save games in xp and them putting them in the right place in win7. Not only can some saves be in My Games and others just right into Publisher-named folders in My Docs, but some are hidden in numeric folders in steam/userdata and FEAR1 was actually in some Public (non-user) folder which I never did find on the old disk.

So yeah, that is all, just a rant. While I like steam for 4-packs and network gaming with friends, you would think they could control where the save game files end up.

[pts]

Let's see what mine looks like...

%User%-folder
1. \Saved Games
2. \My Documents\My Games
3. \My Documents\Saved Games
4. \My Documents\SavedGames (yeah...)
(+4 individual folders)

Not to mention the horde of games that save stuff in AppData\Roaming or their install folder.


I'd like ONE folder to rule them all, please?

[Mind Dragon]

You might want to check virtualstore as well -- usually smaller games, indie or older games. I think it is \Users\userid\AppData\Local. Yes, sometimes people put things in default or public userids - "clever bastards".

I perform clean installs only. I tried saving and copying over steam game data but it insists on re-downloading the whole game again when the game is installed. You can use the backup feature but then it still downloads deltas/altered files -- I dont know if it saves added files. Thus if you have mods or fan patches... then you need another copy to overlay it -- or redo all that.

Flash games might use another area as well.

[Mind Dragon]

For Fear 1, maybe the game directory itself?

I also see a \ProgramData directory on W7.

[Josho]

That is what I like about games with Steam cloud support. I've pretty much kissed goodbye to a lot of my old saves on my old system... though I did end up digging out the SpaceChem save from the AppData hidden folder. However, for Just Cause 2 as an example, I fired up steam after getting it reinstalled on my new system and a host of saves are sitting there, with my latest progress at around 58% ready to go.

However, with saves being thrown into any random area, and on C: drive no less, I hear you mate.