I recently had to reinstall windows due to driver issues and copied all my Steam games in the steamapps folder from the C-drive to another drive, but now I'm stuck with a problem. I have installed Steam again, but when I copy the games' backup to the steamapps folder, and then install the games again, they don't seem to pickup any game files and just starts to download the games again. I have tried verifying game cache, but it just jumps to downloading as well and I have tried modifying the appmanifest files but nothing have worked so far. Any other suggestions I could try before downloading 200GB+ again with a 4Mbps line (500kbps).
Would there be any way that I can make a 'Steam'-backup (backup and restore steam games in the menu) from the games in their folders, with other words, create a bunch of *.csd and *.csm files so Steam can identify it as restoreable?
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\GAME-NAME
. Another possibility is that you don't really need to download everything, just a few files. When you install a game again like this the client should search for files. If it does this and then starts downloading files, it'll will always look like its downloading the entire game even if its not. Pause the download and restart it and see if the progress changes.