f13.net

I really must have too many games in library, 40 dvds? Compressed?

I think I'll need one of those blu-ray rw's at some point.

Why backup?

Backing up isn't a bad idea if you're planning a reinstall on a new drive. Of course, the only practical way to do this is with a 2nd drive. I've done this. Back up to second drive (or second partition), reinstall on either the same machine or a new drive, then backup from the HD. Reinstalling a 20 gig game takes 20 minutes instead of 4 hours of DLing. May or may not be more convenient, depending on your bandwidth.

Yup, going to wipe the 1tb drive, downloading 250 gigs would make me cry on my 1.5mbit line

I consider it punishment for my ISP, but I can totally understand not wanting to suck that all down.

Screw this, I'm burning down the OS now, Apparently Win7 CAN BSOD, granted I'm pretty much blaming this shitty Rosetta Stone (since it did it during the installation) absent any other proof.

Backup wise, you can just flat copy the files in steamapps. There's nothing fancy about the directory or the files. Plop them in new steamapps dir (post steam install) and try to install the games via steam.

It'll go out, compare files, and go "oh, I only need like 4k of random data!" and be happy.

for real? how about games that use stupid shit like Game for Window Live, like Fallout 3?

GFWL should just need a reinstall of the GFWL client (on MS's site, or steam may run the install by itself when it does it's prep for launch thing)

Anything with additional DRM will likely have an extra step or three to register it, but steam should handle that.

Fallout 3 patches itself outside of Steam both via GFWL and through some proprietary thing, but I'd hope it would all sort itself out if you just did what kildorn suggested.

If the gamefiles that the outside updaters (and I suppose the updater application itself) are inside the steamapps folder then Steam won't give a rat's ass.

I never once opened steam when launching/patching Aion and when I upgraded from Win7 RC to the full version, I moved it via the steamapps->backup method.

Only game I have had problems with when moving steam was Plants vs. Zombies when I upgraded from XP to 7RC because it apparently kept its user data in some obscure hidden place outside of the steam folders so I lost my progress.

A lot of games these days keep savegames and such in the windows Users folder (formerly Documents & Settings), you should always be checking in there for important stuff when changing machines or doing a backup before a reinstall.

I did.

I looked everywhere. Even in %appdata% where the REALLY sneaky stuff like Ventrilo settings usually hide.

Not that this necessarily helps, but have you considered buying an external 1 or 2TB USB HDD?