[FIX/WORKAROUND}Steam Backup and Restore Fix [Waiting for install disc]

[NoHup]

Hi everyone, I used to use the steam backup and restore feature quite often as I play Dota 2 and most of the time I rage quit and uninstall the game (muscle memory xD).

So one time while restoring the backup of Dota 2 (While creating the backup I used the DVD option, and I would get around 5 folders from Disc_01 to Disc_05) the steam app restored around 9 gigs of the game out of 35 gigs (this might vary I believe) and started throwing the error "WAITING FOR INSTALL DISC" and pause the installation. When I clicked on resume the app started DOWNLOADING the rest of the game instead of restoring it from the backup (THE AUDACITY).


So I went and checked the content_logs.txt and saw that the app is only taking the first disc and ignoring the rest of the discs. I was like bruh what is this bs. Then I went inside the Disc folders and saw that one of the file named sku.sis is common in all and can be opened using notepad (it's more like a json object without the colons).


The FIX -

In all the sku.sis files there's only 1 change that is the disc value

Ex - for disc_01
"sku"
{
"name" "Dota 2"
"disks" "5"
"disk" "1"
"backup" "1"
"contenttype" "3"
"apps"
...................etc

For disc_02

"sku"
{
"name" "Dota 2"
"disks" "5"
"disk" "2"
"backup" "1"
"contenttype" "3"
"apps"
..............etc


Now what you should do is copy all the files from your other disc folders (disc02 to 0X) into disc_01 folder except the sku.sis file. After copying, delete the rest of the folders and keep only disc_01, in sku.sis file change 2 fields - disks and disc to 1

"sku"
{
"name" "Dota 2"
"disks" "1"
"disk" "1"
"backup" "1"
"contenttype" "3"
"apps"
........

So as of now your folder will have 1 sku.sis file and other backup files, now you can restore your game without the "WAITING FOR DISC" error assuming that your backup files are not courrupted :)

Enjoi

[NoHup]

Or you can just create a backup with custom size which is big enough to save the backup in one disk

[wrOngplanet]

Awesome, thank you for posting this! Worked great for Half-Life: Alyx (68 GB installed).

I for one have just used the "DVD-size" when making backups, even if I don't use DVD's anymore. Little did I know how useless that would be (if not for your post). But when did Steam become this dumb? I have used this Restore function before, and it didn't complain then.

It still re-downloaded about 1.5 GB or so "update" though. I thought that was a little bit odd as I made the backup just prior to uninstalling it (I needed to remove it temporarily), but okay. Much quicker than re-downloadingh 68 GB anyway.


Sidenote: Imagine all the unnecessary waiting and waisted Internet bandwidth Steam causes with this... they should really fix it!

[NoHup]

Originally posted by wrOngplanet:

Awesome, thank you for posting this! Worked great for Half-Life: Alyx (68 GB installed).

I for one have just used the "DVD-size" when making backups, even if I don't use DVD's anymore. Little did I know how useless that would be (if not for your post). But when did Steam become this dumb? I have used this Restore function before, and it didn't complain then.

It still re-downloaded about 1.5 GB or so "update" though. I thought that was a little bit odd as I made the backup just prior to uninstalling it (I needed to remove it temporarily), but okay. Much quicker than re-downloadingh 68 GB anyway.


Sidenote: Imagine all the unnecessary waiting and waisted Internet bandwidth Steam causes with this... they should really fix it!

I'm glad this helped you!
The backup/restore is a legacy function which hasn't been updated since forever I believe, and yea towards the end of the restore there is a small download (for me it's around 400mb for Dota 2) which exists but it's better than downloading the whole game xD

[wrOngplanet]

Mystery solved. It was some workshop content that downloaded. After unsubscribing everything (and another reinstall), it didn't download anything extra (Steam still requires to be online for restoring games afaik).

Yeah I guess that backup / restore is an old remnants, that file dialogue is ancient.

[NoHup]

Originally posted by wrOngplanet:

Mystery solved. It was some workshop content that downloaded. After unsubscribing everything (and another reinstall), it didn't download anything extra (Steam still requires to be online for restoring games afaik).

Yeah I guess that backup / restore is an old remnants, that file dialogue is ancient.

Yea steam client needs to be online while restoring, hoping that steam updates this feature (which is highly unlikely).