Loading Steam Apps backup to New Computer

[rufdraft]

Gotta question ? Just got a new computer with Windows 7 64 bit. Same as my old computer. I now have Railsimulator 2016, Raildriver, New Corsair SP2500 speakers and for now everything is running great.
Like everyone else I have alot of modifications and lots of everything else. My plan is to use my Steam Apps Backup and after exiting Steam on the new computer, delete the Steam Apps Folder there and then copy over my Steam Apps BACKUP to the new computer. Is there a chance in hell that this would work or is there a better way ?

[buzz456]

You don't really need to delete anything until you want to if you are going to retire or sell your old machine. Steam is perfectly happy to have more than one installation.

[rufdraft]

Umm..Ive had Railworks on both computers for a long time. I just retired 1 machine but still have 2 left. The reason I want to delete the New Steam Apps on the new machine and copy over my Steam Apps backup from a external harddrive is basically it would take a very long time to load every file Ive added through the yrs. I dont know if I have enough days left in my life to do that ! Hopefully this short-cut will work for me. Hope u have a better understanding of my plan and what Im trying to do. But the question is will this work ? Ive never used the backup option in the game

[Terry]

I have the same situation: new PC, lots of third-party add-ons to the sim on the old one.

I thought about a copy/paste from old to new but will that really work? It would take quite some time to reload the whole thing from scratch. I was able to get the new machine to load and install the sim and the DC I have bought.

Surely this isn't an uncommon question?

[buzz456]

It not a uncommon question but there is no really right answer. A lot of us have this stuff backed up to a external hard drive making this really easy. That way you can just select what you want to transfer and what not. I just dumped the whole content folder over and then culled the stuff I never use with RWTools. Assets all depend on how much junk you have accumulated. If you haven't priced external hard drives lately they have gotten really reasonable and it sure make migration easier and then the constant backup is really nice if for some reason your computer goes south on you.

[Terry]

Buzz,

I have owned several external drives over time, and I have a pair of external portable 2TB drives attached to the old computer now. I could not agree with you more about their value. In fact, one of those drives has tens of gigabytes of assorted downloads for RW/TS20xx.

You mentioned assets: therein lies the problem, as they say. I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty what assets are useful and what aren't, though I may have some notion for some of them.

I'll back up what I have on the new machine and try loading up what I know I need. Anything still missing can be copied from the old machine. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but I thought I would see what others have done. Thanks for the reply!

[Ericmopar]

Gotta question ? Just got a new computer with Windows 7 64 bit. Same as my old computer. I now have Railsimulator 2016, Raildriver, New Corsair SP2500 speakers and for now everything is running great.
Like everyone else I have alot of modifications and lots of everything else. My plan is to use my Steam Apps Backup and after exiting Steam on the new computer, delete the Steam Apps Folder there and then copy over my Steam Apps BACKUP to the new computer. Is there a chance in hell that this would work or is there a better way ?

That's what I do.
I don't have any games other than Train Simulator 2016, so I just back up the Railworks folder or "Common" folder first with all my mods already installed.
Then if I move Steam or do a new install like I did the other day to dink around with Steam on Linux, I can just install the modded Railworks folder.

I also install complicated things like Steam with Railworks on a separate partition these days. That way if I have to upgrade or reinstall the operating system, the Steam partition is already there. All I have to do after a reinstall is find "Steam.exe" and send a shortcut to the desktop.

With Windows, two Linux installs and my Steam Partition I have about 12 partitions.

[Terry]

Just curious, Eric: what "flavors" of Linux do you run?

[Ericmopar]

Just curious, Eric: what "flavors" of Linux do you run?

Mint and Ubuntu. The new versions of Mint use LTS versions of Ubuntu's core/kernel so you get the nice desktops with stability.
I accidentally unmounted one of my Linux drives somehow while playing with Wine and Play on Linux and couldn't recover it or remount it another way. LOL
So I ended up in a position to reinstall them.
I needed to clean up my partitions etc from the inevitable learning curve the last few months anyways.

I really like Mint 17.3 cinnamon, but they said it will get a big core update with the new version of Ubuntu 16 LTS in the next couple of months, so I'm maybe going to wait to reinstall everything clean.
The new versions of Mint are very stable now. That's why they are using the Ubuntu LTS core/kernel now.
I've gotten pretty good at reinstalling Boot managers in Windows and Linux.
I've also learned to give all windows partitions a name, since Linux and Windows will both see a name, unlike drive designations which are totally different in each OS. Examples being (C:) Windows and (S:) Steam Partition.
I've always seen advice to memorize and write down partition sizes to keep track between Windows and Linux drive designations.
I've never once seen online the simple idea of naming all the partitions in Windows first, so they are easily identifiable in a Linux partition manager, mentioned in any forum on either side... They really seem to hate each other.

If we want to talk Linux any more than this that's great, but one of us should start a new thread in Geek Speak.

Eric.