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I've got two computers in my home network, both with Steam installed. If there's an update to Steam itself or the kids install a game it has to be downloaded to both. At the moment this happens twice, once for each computer.
Is there something I can do either within Steam or externally so that only one download happens and Steam picks up the local copy, thus saving my bandwidth?
In my own experience you can simple copy paste the entire Steam/Valve folder and run it from it's new destination.
Hence, yes you can just copy the entire game's folder with the updates to the other computer
And I just stumbled upon a Super User question about this. Quoting John T:
I do this all the time it is fine to do. Any files that do not match are usually re-downloaded from Steam, hence why it will still update a bit after a fresh copy. If you do not want all the sounds and maps which take up a lot of space, you can simply take the .gcf files for each game from Program Files/Steam/SteamApps, these are the biggest files in the update which will save the most time.
Steam also has a "Backup" feature you can use. The files it creates can be moved from PC to PC and restored on any one.
Another option is to backup through steam on one machine and then restore the backup to the 2nd machine.
