Restoring games backed up with Windows 7 to Windows 10

[galandar42]

Okay, since Steam is ending its support for Windows 7, I decided to finally take the plunge and installed Windows 10 on a new SSD. I had backed up all my games using Steam under Windows 7 because I have a slow internet connection and it takes a lot less time restoring a backup than re-downloading them. Now, however, I have Windows 10 installed and I installed the Steam client, but restoring a backup doesn't seem to work. The activity circle just spins and spins and it says it is restoring, but the progress indicator never fills up, and nothing is being written to my Steam game directory. Am I screwed???

[ReflexShift]

If you still have windows 7 installed you can just copy paste the games from the old hard drive to the new Windows 10 ssd. Just make sure you copy the games to the right Steam directory in Windows 10 and when you go to install the game it will verify the existing game folder instead of re-downloading it.

[galandar42]

Okay, thanks Reflex. That was my next move, and I may have to do that, but I have noticed something else. While I was trying to restore a game (Stellaris in this case) I noticed that Steam was also downloading stuff, which I thought was a bit strange since I was restoring a game rather than downloading it. It turns out that Steam was updating Redistributables, and maybe it can't restore a game until they are updated. It has updated these Redistributables three or four times now, and this last time it actually started restoring the backups before pausing to update the Redistributables again. I guess that would make sense, since this is a fresh install of the Steam client, and the Redistributables haven't been updated yet. Guess I'll have to wait and see if it restores backups after the Redistributables have been completely updated.

[ReflexShift]

Yeah it definitely will have to download the redist files as they are needed to play the games, this is normal on a new install of Windows. If you can't get the games from backing them up, copy pasting them will work. I sometimes just copy new games to an external ssd and transfer them to my other computers so I don't have to re-download them. It takes a fraction of the time by doing this.