Where is the information about custom collections stored?

[CheeseBoar]

Before the big Steam Library overhaul, if you made custom categories for you games, that information was stored in Steam\userdata\[PROFILE]\7\remote\sharedconfig.vdf, but with the new library, that file seems completely obsolete. It never updates anymore, deleting it doesn't do anything, and using programs like Depressurizer to customize categories does absolutely nothing anymore.

Sometimes my categories get messed up, so I like to locally back up the file that keeps track of my customizations. But with the new Collections system in place, I can't for the life of me figure out where the information is stored to back it up. It seems like it's going to be in a centralized folder somewhere now, or maybe the registry, since any changes I make are seemingly consistent across multiple Steam client setups, even when kept in Offline Mode. Does anyone know where to find the file that stores information about your custom collections? Thanks in advance.

[JayD]

Sorry for the necro but did you ever figure this out? I haven't lost my collections (yet lol) but I lost my shortcuts to my Non-Steam Games and when I restored an old shortcuts.vdf file, the shortcuts were no longer tied to their custom collections so now I have to do all that over again. :-\

[JayD]

After running Process Monitor to log what Steam was doing as I added and removed user collections, I found that the place where it stores this information is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\<user-id>\config\localconfig.vdf

[CheeseBoar]

Yeah, I believe it's located in AppData\Local\Steam\htmlcache\Local Storage\leveldb. It's one of the files in that folder, so I just back up the whole thing.

[JayD]

Yeah it looks like I was wrong and it's not localconfig.vdf. It's in Local Storage like you said:
https://github.com/Depressurizer/Depressurizer/issues/165#issuecomment-533133083

[JayD]

But apparently that's only part of the story though. I can see that for actual Steam games (not the shortcuts to Non-Steam Games), Steam still keeps track of collections/tags? in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\<user-id>\7\remote\sharedconfig.vdf file as well.

[CheeseBoar]

Yeah, Steam still does something to that file, but it doesn't seem to actually mean anything. I've moved an entire Steam installation from one machine to another after completely deleting the sharedconfig.vdf file, and as long as I have that Local Storage folder from AppData, everything is kept organized on the new machine. I don't know what it's editing in sharedconfig.vdf, but it seems inconsequential to me.

[JayD]

Good to know!

[Sir Spartalot 1. Peeker]

Originally posted by CheeseBoar:

Yeah, I believe it's located in AppData\Local\Steam\htmlcache\Local Storage\leveldb. It's one of the files in that folder, so I just back up the whole thing.

Thanks a lot mate. :D You saved me a lot of trouble. Steam did not migrate my old collections to the new pc. Doing it manually worked now