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.

[july]

How about Updating ?

[aKill]

Originally posted by ｎｕｔ.:

How about Updating ?

I'm not sure if it works the same way. But if the downloaded files for the update are downloaded into the 'downloading' folder. I'd assume the same method should work. Try it out and let me know.

[Frost]

Thanks mate.

[631065853]

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 631065853:

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

Did you just lose the download progress, or did the download actually restart?
If it's just lost progress, this method should work if you followed all the steps. But if steam restarted the download, then there's nothing you can do. You're older progress is lost for good. :(

If you've made the backup of your cached download files properly (step 1), do the steps after that again and see if it works.


(Obviously don't do step 1 the second time as you'd be backing up the new download progress and not the original one)

[info]

Originally posted by 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...

i know you're not talking to me, but dude, i followed the steps EXACTLY, Even backed up the game files (it was an update), you just made a 12 gbs update, a 24 gbs game, i have to redownload it all over again with my 128kb/s speed. i downloaded 5 gbs today, i was backing up the files, exited steam by mistakes, :) let's just say losing a whole day of download progress isn't the most pleasurable feeling.
Edit: I know you tried to help and all, it fixed it for some people, and ruined it for others. what worked for me is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvx_JgIWo_4 sadly, if i hadn't deleted the game files it would've recovered the game and a few gbs from the update, but i deleted it way before i saw it. anyway, check it out, it might help you.

[ak]

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

its ok mate dont worry brother paladins is a ♥♥♥♥ game

[Moss]

Steam servers are a joke, always have been, never get this issue on origin, xbox live, or anything else for that matter, it seems to be a steam issue that they've never bothered to fix. No matter when its done, how often i change download region, it never fixes. I'm supposed to get 8.3 mbs but I rarely get 2 if I'm lucky but usually stays at 500 kbs. After finishing a 1 gigabyte download in an embarrassingly slow 30 minutes it just restarts all over again, I'd expect a company as big as steam to be able to control this, but nope!

[TheRapie]

the game I am downloading the last 18 hours is 31gb, my download folder is 34gb large and after I copied it back and forth I started my download at 198mb, how is this possible?

Also, I´ve got 2 .patch files with the number of my game. the last digit of the second number of the patch file is incremented by one

[OGProtiny]

funny thing is my steam crashed, well sort off, I have this bug where if steam is in full screen and I start a game in full screen windows acts as if the application isnt on the foreground and whenever you try to click in it it dissapears to the background.
So I restarted steam, had to move to a ♥♥♥♥ appartment this week for a while where I have ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 1mbps internet (litterally should be illegal). So I downloaded 4.7GB of my 5.3GB PUBG update. restart steam and boom it's all ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gone entirely. so immediately I close steam and go to the dowloading folder and IT'S ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EMPTY, like really? REALLY? Steam deleted the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ files that's just awesome innit?

[aKill]

Originally posted by ♠ OG Protiny | Thunderpick.com:

funny thing is my steam crashed, well sort off, I have this bug where if steam is in full screen and I start a game in full screen windows acts as if the application isnt on the foreground and whenever you try to click in it it dissapears to the background.
So I restarted steam, had to move to a ♥♥♥♥ appartment this week for a while where I have ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 1mbps internet (litterally should be illegal). So I downloaded 4.7GB of my 5.3GB PUBG update. restart steam and boom it's all ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gone entirely. so immediately I close steam and go to the dowloading folder and IT'S ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EMPTY, like really? REALLY? Steam deleted the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ files that's just awesome innit?

Damn sad man... :P
Hope you get to play soon... :D

[OGProtiny]

Originally posted by aKill:

Originally posted by ♠ OG Protiny | Thunderpick.com:

funny thing is my steam crashed, well sort off, I have this bug where if steam is in full screen and I start a game in full screen windows acts as if the application isnt on the foreground and whenever you try to click in it it dissapears to the background.
So I restarted steam, had to move to a ♥♥♥♥ appartment this week for a while where I have ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 1mbps internet (litterally should be illegal). So I downloaded 4.7GB of my 5.3GB PUBG update. restart steam and boom it's all ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gone entirely. so immediately I close steam and go to the dowloading folder and IT'S ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EMPTY, like really? REALLY? Steam deleted the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ files that's just awesome innit?

Damn sad man... :P
Hope you get to play soon... :D

haha yeah asked my bro to dowload the update for me on an external so luckily I can play now but it was super annoying.

[carlos.fernandez.2013]

don't just restart the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ installation, uninstall the download/installation or whatever and reinstall it (step 3-4)

[puct]

the backstory was the best thing i've read in ages

[aKill]

Originally posted by caret^:

the backstory was the best thing i've read in ages

Thank you... :P