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.

[Botlivesmatter]

someone plz help i have sattellite internet due to my parents living way the ♥♥♥♥ out of town and me not having a choice in the matter so i download on average at about 100 kbs and at night i get a little boost but i was downloading black desert online and the download suddenly said 700 mbs earlier this morning I looked in my downloads folder and sure enough there was a 30 gig file for BDO but steam wouldnt reconize it so i am at a loss for what to do. please reply thank you

[aKill]

Oprindeligt skrevet af BOT lives matter:

someone plz help i have sattellite internet due to my parents living way the ♥♥♥♥ out of town and me not having a choice in the matter so i download on average at about 100 kbs and at night i get a little boost but i was downloading black desert online and the download suddenly said 700 mbs earlier this morning I looked in my downloads folder and sure enough there was a 30 gig file for BDO but steam wouldnt reconize it so i am at a loss for what to do. please reply thank you

Could it be that the main game has been installed and you're dowloading an update? Hmm... but if that's the case then the 30 gigs worth of files would be in the commons folder...

Try following the steps mentioned above. Hopefully it would work. Good luck!

[nosreg216]

Thanks so much!! This saved my life :D

[KINGOR]

I've tried one of those methods you talked about that gave me 6GB from the 8GB I had from H1Z1 (15BG the entire game), it looks like closer to your method: https://steamcommunity.com/app/208650/discussions/0/594821545181748202/?ctp=7

[aKill]

Oprindeligt skrevet af KINGOR:

I've tried one of those methods you talked about that gave me 6GB from the 8GB I had from H1Z1 (15BG the entire game), it looks like closer to your method: https://steamcommunity.com/app/208650/discussions/0/594821545181748202/?ctp=7

Yeah, this is the one I found. I took a few steps from here... but this one tried doing covoluted steps. Seemed like there was a simpler way... so I tried my method... :P

[letitburn]

Meanwhile me at download progress of 45GB out of 96GB(Middle earth: Shadow of War).. Reading this gave me a roller coaster of emotions. All hope was lost when I read the part about game patches and giving up haha 5 days thrown out of the window. My ISP caps my Steam downloads at 9GB per day.

[ch!M]

noice a update from payday 2 right when i was downloading
and i got rekt

[Wolfender]

Just had this problem with Rainbow Six siege (57 Gb at 700kb/s lol) but all the files are here, Steam purely ignores them. The replacement didn't work for me, guess i'll let my pc on tonight -_-

[SamTheHumanMoose]

how do i back up the file?

[aKill]

Oprindeligt skrevet af SamTheHumanMoose:

how do i back up the file?

Regular copy paste works...

[joemighty16]

Thank you for taking the time to write this!

In my case, unfortunately, it did not work. I was downloading Middle Earth Shadow of War... 96GB. I think around the 90GB+ mark I stopped the download (which has been going on and off for a few days) and ran some PC cleaning processes. I think I may have damaged the temporary downloaded files.

I followed your steps, but could never restart the installation process because by then my hard drive was out of space... 90GB in the Downloading folder with only about 50GB free. But even when I backed up the Downloading folder to an external hard drive (which took an hour) it didn't want to recalculate the progress when I restarted the download and replaced the Downloading folder. I also deleted the files you mentioned, but to no avail.

So I sighed, deleted the 90 GB and started the process all over. I wasn't planning on playing it soon, and only wanted to download it so that I could make a proper game backup.

But still, thank you! I hope your internet issue has at least improved by now.

[aKill]

Oprindeligt skrevet af joemighty16:

Thank you for taking the time to write this!

In my case, unfortunately, it did not work. I was downloading Middle Earth Shadow of War... 96GB. I think around the 90GB+ mark I stopped the download (which has been going on and off for a few days) and ran some PC cleaning processes. I think I may have damaged the temporary downloaded files.

I followed your steps, but could never restart the installation process because by then my hard drive was out of space... 90GB in the Downloading folder with only about 50GB free. But even when I backed up the Downloading folder to an external hard drive (which took an hour) it didn't want to recalculate the progress when I restarted the download and replaced the Downloading folder. I also deleted the files you mentioned, but to no avail.

So I sighed, deleted the 90 GB and started the process all over. I wasn't planning on playing it soon, and only wanted to download it so that I could make a proper game backup.

But still, thank you! I hope your internet issue has at least improved by now.

Yup, it has... :)
Shame about your case though... hope you get to play soon...

[76561198860421168]

thanks
it worked.
it was very stressful as my download speed is 220 kb/sec

[Mr. Panda]

is this working for workshop downloads too?

[aKill]

Oprindeligt skrevet af ピピ美:

is this working for workshop downloads too?

I'm not sure... but if you have no other choice, might as well give it a shot...