Steam.exe is downloading from OneDrive

[Chris Solomon]

I just got anew laptop, and am still setting things up. when I logged into steam for the first time on the new machine, I received a notification from OneDrive, that steam.exe was downloading files to my system. It doesn't appear to be anything bad, in fact it appears to be save files for games that did not support the steam cloud from my old system. for the moment it appears to be downloading my save files for "The Witcher" I thought I was going to have to either start over (start a new game), or manually transfer my saves. I have OneDrive and steam setup on both my old system and my new system. I did not even know that OneDrive and steam were talking to each other on my old system. this is really neat. has anybody else encountered this?

Old System:
Toshiba P500-ST6844
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
Onedrive - yes

New system
MSI GE73 Raider RGB 8RE
Windows 10 Professional 1809
Microsoft Account - yes
Onedrive - yes
features disabled for "security and privacy" - NO

[Snapjak]

You probably have Onedrive configured to backup your /My Documents/ folder.

That's where many games save things.

[Chris Solomon]

ok... that's where they were..... looks like its more of a feature of windows 10 than it is of steam or onedrive. There is a setting in Settings > Privacy called Automatic File Downloads.I have left it at it's default state, so nothing is being blocked from being auto downloaded. this is a awesome feature. It looks like in order for the files to be downloaded in the first place, another program has to request the files in the first place, before they will be downloaded. I have not even played the games yet that the save files are for, although the files for the game are installed.

I transferred my steam library from my old system to a Seagate Expansion drive (which i got because of the lack of storage on the new laptop). so all i needed to do on the new system is install Steam, and setup a hardlink pointing to the library on the expansion drive. I don't know why, but the expansion drives seem to be quite a bit faster than the backup drives made by seagate. I have not noticed any slowdowns what so ever running my games from the expansion drive. It was a major pain in the a$$ to get them onto the expansion drive in the first place though.... the transfer rate was really, reallly, really, slow. it could be becuase the old system was using USB 2.0, i don't know.

[Sesshomaru]

\AppData\Local\OneDrive\My Documents\My games

[Sesshomaru]

How to stop Steam games from creating save data folder on Onedrive!

"I just found out that if you MOVE the content of your onedrive/mydocuments folder (wich should be a folder called "My games" and a few other folder with game names on them) to the local my documents folder, the game will find and use THAT local folder instead of the Onedrive's one AND the save data folders will stop being created there. Just so somebody wanted to know."

posted byu/Pacoroto
2 years ago

[Chris Solomon]

the feuature is a part of windows 10. to disable it (though, why would you?) go to settings > Prvacy > Automatic File Downloads


NOTE: 1903 and 1909 have the setting as only showing stuff you have disallowed from auto downloading. you can only re-enable the setting from there. earlier windows 10 versions have a toggle setting i believe.

in any case, why would you want to block this? this is steam requesting you steam cloud data. it is not downloaded until steam requests it.