This is annoying...

[AOwlNation]

Ok so I have been downloading Red Dead Redemption 2 for nearly 3 days, kept my Laptop plugged in and connected, till today it downloaded nearly 100gb out of 112gb.
I just restarted my laptop to find that steam is re-downloading from 0%.

Give me a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ break already.

[Pscht]

WHY did you restart?

[Carlos100]

Why would you even chance restarting your laptop when you knew your internet was bad and you was so close?

[AOwlNation]

Foolish mistake, I was doing some work installing IDE's and Working on projects, so I had to restart and I totally forgot about RDR2 Installation.

[AyaSensei067]

Restarting your computer isn't a good idea when downloading a game...

[AOwlNation]

Steam could've handled that just like other platforms, sadly it's time and money waste, Internet is silly slow and paid by quota where I spawned.

[Ogami]

No, the problem here is that if a game gets an update or patch during the time you download it and you pause the download for whatever reason, Steam will check the downloading files against the ones on their servers when you resume, see that the ones on the server are "newer" and will restart the download from scratch.
Your downfall was that Red Dead Redemption 2 got a small hotfix patch 11 hours ago, so your version in the download was no longer the current one.
And so everything was reset to zero when you restarted the laptop.

Without that patch the download would just have continued from where you stopped. the patch/update situation is the only exception where it restarts.
Just bad luck.

[Crazy Tiger]

In my experience if you properly close Steam, it'll resume the download like any other program. Force closing Steam, like when you restart the device without properly closing Steam, will indeed cause a download loss. Most programs/platforms can run into that.

[AOwlNation]

Originally posted by Ogami:

No, the problem here is that if a game gets an update or patch during the time you download it and you pause the download for whatever reason, Steam will check the downloading files against the ones on their servers when you resume, see that the ones on the server are "newer" and will restart the download from scratch.
Your downfall was that Red Dead Redemption 2 got a small hotfix patch 11 hours ago, so your version in the download was no longer the current one.
And so everything was reset to zero when you restarted the laptop.

Without that patch the download would just have continued from where you stopped. the patch/update situation is the only exception where it restarts.
Just bad luck.

Thank you very much for explaining.

[Pepe]

If the accepted answer is true, it's a big design flaw. This is clearly not logical for any kind of difference/delta based file transfer system. That's like having dual personality and one identity is fighting against your goal of having resilience.

[AOwlNation]

Originally posted by Pepe:

If the accepted answer is true, it's a big design flaw. This is clearly not logical for any kind of difference/delta based file transfer system. That's like having dual personality and one identity is fighting against your goal of having resilience.

Exactly, and As far as I know updates/patches should be incremental, instead of wiping the entire progress and starting over, it is also called " Incremental computation".
My friend also had this issue happened to him while ago while downloading War thunder.

[AOwlNation]

It is not my first time obviously shutting down my laptop while downloading, it rarely does start over again, last time I remember this happening was years ago.
So the most logical explanation is the chosen answer I believe.

[NakiBest]

I wonder what will happen when (if??) game downloads become 200 GB, 300 GB, 1 TB in size!?

Then even on a fairly fast connection it will take a while to download, and a patch or two can come anytime.. :)

[AOwlNation]

It will become as scary as Flashing your BIOS.
Should never lose power, under any circumstances.

[Ogami]

Originally posted by Pepe:

If the accepted answer is true, it's a big design flaw. This is clearly not logical for any kind of difference/delta based file transfer system. That's like having dual personality and one identity is fighting against your goal of having resilience.

Its sadly how Steam has been designed from the ground up. Games are always kept up to date, you cant even start a game if a update was released before you download and install it.
As soon as the client sees a updated version of a game it will download the files.

People have asked Valve for years to change how the downloads work, rather then restarting the entire download because of a patch, let it finish downloading the old version, THEN the patch afterwards.
But apparently thats a no go from Valve for whatever reason.
It may have made sense when games were just a few GB at max but with games approaching multiple hundred GB of data it more and more becomes a problem for users with slower internet connections.

It also does not help that many new games are a total mess at release and will most likely get many patches and hotfix updates for months after launch.

[BloodShed]

Originally posted by NakiBest:

I wonder what will happen when (if??) game downloads become 200 GB, 300 GB, 1 TB is size!?

Then even on a fairly fast connection it will take a while to download, and a patch or two can come anytime.. :)

Ark: Survival Evolved + all DLC (435.17GB) only takes approx. 6 hours on my connection.
It's not that bad.