Swapping Games and Data to a portable hardrive?

[Deleted]

I'd like to swap my Games, their data and Mods over to a portable hardrive so if I want to clear my OS at any point I won't have to reinstall all of my games on my beyond terrible internet, Can anybody tell me how to? Help would be appreciated

[Fuzzykins]

Click (and hold click) on the folder. Then drag the folder into the portable hard drive.

If you have troubles when you go to transfer it back (like nothing will run, etc.) then start the download, move all the data into the folder that the Steam downloader or whatever creates, then it'll be like "Yo, there's all this stuff in here already, I don't have to do shit." and it'll validate the install and be on its way.

That said, games like WoW are completely self sufficient. (I just had this issue.) B.net installed WoW to my mechanical, I just dragged everything onto my SSD, then told Battle.net where the WoW folder was and it worked fine.

[Deleted]

So no reinstalling onto the hard-drive?

[Fuzzykins]

So no reinstalling onto the hard-drive?

Generally no. There may be a few games that are dicks about it. What games are you planning on transferring?

[Deleted]

All that I own :/

[Fuzzykins]

All that I own :/

Thank you for the impressive insight. Would you perchance like to go a little more in depth on your library of games? Any Blizzard games can be moved without pain. Any Steam games without a launcher can be moved without too much trouble using the technique I described above. uPlay games cannot be moved.

[fixx]

And unless it's USB3 drive the games will run much slower than from internal HDD.

[Twoddle]

Depends on how the game saves your progress data if that's what you mean. You just have to find the folder that contains that data, back it up then restore it to the same location after you've reinsalled the OS and the game.

Usually but not always there's a folder called 'Saved' within the game's program folder, other than that try looking in the OS's application settings folder.

[Aruhen]

I backed up all my Steam games (150 of them) to an external recently when I reinstalled Windows. All I had to do was run the installer again and it was fine. No need to redownload. Biggest problem is the save files if it doesn't use the Steam Cloud. I used Game Save Manager or whatever it's called for that.