Fix for the Steam download reset / progress lost bug

[aKill]

A little backstory, you can skip to the instructions if you want :
So I currently live in my parents house, a little outskirts from the city; and when I heard the news from all my ISP providers that nobody can offer me a broadband connection, I felt my life was over. And Dishonored 2 just went on sale 50% off and I had no net to download it. It felt like the universe was laughing at my expense.

I bought the game anyways. But now I needed to figure out a way to download it right? Luckily, where I'm from, a new telecom service provider had come into the picture offering 1GB of 4G data per day. So I made a plan (no pun intended). I had 2 SIM cards from the provider and a wireless dongle. So if I swaped out the cards everyday, I can get 2GB data per day. So that's what I did... for 5 days... finally downloading 10GB, out of 33GB. Thought to my self, if I keep this up, I can start playing Dishonored 2 in about 12 to 13 days... provided there weren't any "Day 1" updates or anything.

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men...

Woke up today morning to find the download progress bar suddenly missing from the bottom of the screen. I thought it might me mistake so I restart steam, but it was still missing. I even restart my PC. Still no use. It had finally sunk in that steam screwed up and I lost all the download progress. 10GB may not seem like much, but 5 days was a whole lot of time. I searched all through out the web and there were a few solutions listed, but none of them seemed to work for me. Funny thing is, there was a fix that I had thought of from the start; something very simple and obvious and should technically work. But nobody, throughout the steam forum mentioned this method. So I thought that maybe people have tried this method, but it doesn't work, and they had to do convoluted steps to trick steam to restart the download. Problem is, in the methods people talk about, you still lose a bit of the progress from how they explained it. Like if you initially had 10GB, after their "fix", it would probably restart from 7 or 8GB (which also didn't really happen for me so maybe they didn't mention all the steps to implement the fix?).

Now, the fix I'm mentioning below may have been explained by someone else as well. But after searching for quite a bit, I wasn't able to find it. So duplicate or not, I thought I'll write it here and help who ever else is facing this issue.

Anyways, without further ado, the INSTRUCTIONS to fix the steam download reset / progress lost bug, with a simple(ish) solution.

Step 1 : Backup the downloaded files.
- Exit steam
- Go to the folder "~\SteamLibrary\steamapps\downloading".
- Depending on how many active downloads you have (had), you should see 1 or more folders with a bunch of numbers as the folder name.
- Open each one and find the folder of the game you lost the download progress of. Let's say the game we're talking about is Dishonored 2, so the folder name here should be "403640".
- Backup this folder, and also backup all the ".patch" files that contain the same string of digits.

Step 2 : Restart the installation process.
- Open steam again.
- Go to your library and restart the installation process for the required game.
- Wait for the storage allocation process to complete and wait till the actual download starts.
- If you're lucky, the download should continue from where it left off. If it doesn't, then continue with the rest of the steps.
- Exit steam (and I mean exit, not close to background).

Step 3 : Replace the new downloaded files with the backed up files.
- Pretty self explanatory.
- Go to the folder "~\SteamLibrary\steamapps\downloading".
- Copy all the files you had backed up in step 1, and paste it in the "downloading" folder. Obviously replace the files.

Step 4 : Open Steam and let out a sigh of relief after you see your download progress bar back to where it was before.
- Open steam.
- Let sigh of relief out.
- Thank me in the comments... or rage at the (possible) fact that this could be a duplicate, hunt for the post that has this very explanation, and post the link here?

It would be really odd if this solution wasn't posted elsewhere. Maybe it was posted years ago and just got lost in time and replaced by the other convoluted "fixes"?

Let me know if this fix worked out for you though, or if you're having issues.

There are 2 things that I did that I didn't really mention above cause it really shouldn't matter, but my paranoid self would rather do it and work on the first go than have to possibly do the whole thing again.

1. (Before step 2) Go to your steam installation folder, and search within this folder for any files that have the app ID. The one we found in step 1. 403640 in the case of Dishonored 2. It would be two .bin files starting with title "UserGameStats". Delete them.

2. After step 3, before restarting steam, I restarted by PC for good measure. Like I said, it shouldn't really affect anything... but at the time, I'd rather do it and have it work, than to do redo all the steps again.

[ostu:)]

Thanks a lot! My MGS V download progress was lost and this worked for me. I may had lost like 4GB but it's still better than having to download everything from 0.


In case anybody is wondering - yes, you can skip the two things written at the end. Those really don't matter (at least for me).

[aKill]

Anytime! Really glad it helped... :)

[Sodapop]

followed all the steps but instead of getting the old files back, i was copying the new 200MB back and forth. I read on the internet it is possibly due to a new patch changing the version mid download. I lost 25 hours of download :(

[aKill]

Originally posted by jonass69:

followed all the steps but instead of getting the old files back, i was copying the new 200MB back and forth. I read on the internet it is possibly due to a new patch changing the version mid download. I lost 25 hours of download :(

Oh, the download must have restarted... then there's no way to get it back, cause your previous file were already overwritten right... :/
Damn sad dude...

[eNeBeNe]

Originally posted by aKill:

Originally posted by jonass69:

followed all the steps but instead of getting the old files back, i was copying the new 200MB back and forth. I read on the internet it is possibly due to a new patch changing the version mid download. I lost 25 hours of download :(

Oh, the download must have restarted... then there's no way to get it back, cause your previous file were already overwritten right... :/
Damn sad dude...

Same for me, lost 26gb...

But anyway thank you for posting the fix, maybe it gonna help me in the future ! :)

[LE4]

OH MY GOD THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!! i was waiting for over a week for my game to load, had over 60GBs already loaded when i had the problem, but yours was the only solution that worked, so again...THANK YOU!!

[aKill]

Originally posted by LOKI:

OH MY GOD THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!! i was waiting for over a week for my game to load, had over 60GBs already loaded when i had the problem, but yours was the only solution that worked, so again...THANK YOU!!

:)

[NoBackupPlan]

THANK YOU!! HOLY S... I just had donwloaded 35GB of Witcher 3 and my pc hard crashed. Thing is my download speed is 300kb/s average so, THANKS a LOT man you really saved me! :D

[aKill]

Originally posted by Hor1z0n:

THANK YOU!! HOLY S... I just had donwloaded 35GB of Witcher 3 and my pc hard crashed. Thing is my download speed is 300kb/s average so, THANKS a LOT man you really saved me! :D

Haha, glad I could help... :P
And good luck on your Witcher 3 journey! One of my all time favorites for sure. Don't skip out on the 2 DLCs. I found them to be much better than the main storyline in my opinion...

[cj31]

It didn't restore my progress for the paladins download that i spent some time on? Any help would be apppreciated

[aKill]

Originally posted by cj31:

It didn't restore my progress for the paladins download that i spent some time on? Any help would be apppreciated

Did you follow the steps exactly?
It wouldn't work if the download restarted before you could make a backup of original download...

[supergreekaros]

hi i download call of duty infinite warfare ,I had reached about
60gb progress download,all the game is about 90GB. I shut down steam and pc to continue the next day,the next day open my pc and steam and the progress download of the game lost and continued to download from 8GB ,, wtf,, I tried this step-by-step method without any chance, did not work. some advice would be acceptable. thanks

[aKill]

Yeah, the download restarted... nothing you can do besides cry to the heavens... :/
My method only works when the lost download is still cached and not replaced my a new download...

[Bali505]

*Sigh of relief*

Just lost (only) 8 GB of download progress after a Steam client update.
It had restarted to download from 0 already, so I couldn't do anything.

Will backup bigger downloads in progress first in the future for such cases :)

Thank you

[aKill]

Originally posted by Bali505:

*Sigh of relief* :Sheepy_Smile:

Just lost (only) 8 GB of download progress after a Steam client update.
It had restarted to download from 0 already, so I couldn't do anything.

Will backup bigger downloads in progress first in the future for such cases :)

Thank you :bestbestbest:

Oh, damn sad man... hope you get to play your game soon... :)