Valve/Steam Backup Utility

[schild]

As some of you may know (or not know), Valve has a backup solution to make official dvds out of everything. It'll package everything up and just be generally awesome. Anyway, it's not built into steam per se, all you have to do is click this link (and be logged into Steam:

Steam Backup Utility

Also, for your actual dvd covers we have the following resource:

Half Life 2 covers

Thank me later. Picking out your favorite cover may be hard. I'll probably go with the all black one since Half Life 2 takes an entire dvd on it's own. Enjoy screwing Vivendi. They deserve it.

[geldonyetich]

Very nice.  I was left wishing I had bought a DVD Version of HL2 when I saw the multiple CD format it came in.   (Now all I need to do is get a DVD burner on this computer, as I imagine this isn't burning I can do over the network.)

[SurfD]

(Now all I need to do is get a DVD burner on this computer, as I imagine this isn't burning I can do over the network.)

Home network?  Just grab your entire steam install, and drag it over to your other computer.  Run steam from there.  Easy enough.  Provided you have the harddrive space of course.

[geldonyetich]

Hmm, would that work?  I naturally assumed Steam would spontaniously combust due to lack of registry entries and whatnot on the computer with the burning.

Course, there's really nothing stopping me from installing Half Life 2 from the CDs, then burning to DVD from there.   It's mostly just a matter of reasonable time investment to secure an extra backup.

[sinij]

Very nice. Does it actually works? Say I purchase HL2 over steam, burn it on DVD, get rid of Steam and still will be able to install and play HL2 without having to reinstall Steam?

[Rodent]

Very nice. Does it actually works? Say I purchase HL2 over steam, burn it on DVD, get rid of Steam and still will be able to install and play HL2 without having to reinstall Steam?

You will need to have steam installed for the backup files to be bale to kick in and install. You will also need to keep it installed to actually play the game.

But downloading a 600 kb file ( or well burning it on the dvd aswell ) is better then downloading 4 gb.

[SurfD]

I can tell you from first hand experience that Steam will recreate any reg entrys it needs to run on whatever machine you decide to migrate it to.

When I got my new PC, my method of getting all my existing steam stuff installed on it was to simply grab the steam directory, drag it to its new home on the new drive, and then run the executable from the new home directory.  That was it.  It checked the net, did an update, asked me for my password/login, and then was up and running flawlessly.