Does resetting win 10 os delete all of the steam game files?

[JohnTravoltage]

I live in australia, and redownloading about 800gb of games isn't an option. I would like to not have to bother buying some external storage/another harddrive to back it up aswell.

When I go to reset win 10 os (need to do it to fix something), and choose to keep files, this window appears: http://puu.sh/tnUzl/4b97f456fa.png

Included in it are all of my steam games, but I'm not sure if it means that the files will all be deleted and I have to redownload them, or if it just means that I need to do first time setup for all of them. I will already have to spend a week redownloading windows store games so I really don't want to have to do all my steam games which would probably take another 3 weeks.

[CursedPanther]

You can back up all Steam games so you don't have to re-download everything. It's the same operation as you move the game files to another hard disk.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8794-yphv-2033

[JohnTravoltage]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

You can back up all Steam games so you don't have to re-download everything. It's the same operation as you move the game files to another hard disk.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8794-yphv-2033

yeah, I was just looking it up and it mentions that it removes all programs that are not base windows programs, it just keeps all of the other separate files.

I wonder if I could just move the steam common folder out into my own documents. Depends on if it just removes all of the folder in program files/program files(x86) or not. I wish there was somewhere that explained exactly what stuff it deletes, and if there is a place I can put stuff where nothing within that directory will be deleted.

[Seven7]

there is also information on the website M$ how work each resetting mode - one of them creates a folder windows.old where move all the data from the previous installation (you need enough free space on the disk)

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Yes you can fully reset Win10 back to defaults without reinstalling it or wiping it.
I don't understand why when we say to reinstall your OS, people assume you need to wipe all the data and format the drive. Definitely not true at all. Formatting is an option.

[JohnTravoltage]

Originally posted by Bad-Motha:

Yes you can fully reset Win10 back to defaults without reinstalling it or wiping it.
I don't understand why when we say to reinstall your OS, people assume you need to wipe all the data and format the drive. Definitely not true at all. Formatting is an option.

Thats not the case anyway, when doing the reset I was going to do it would attempt to delete all of the non standard programs, incase they are the reason why your system is unstable (and why you are resetting your os).

Anyway, I fixed the problem by doing some really weird workaround which fixed my problem (forza horizon 3 not letting me play, saying I needed to sign in, which I already was. Had to make a new user on the computer, sign into the xbox app on that, download any game, play it, then sign out, and go back to the normal account and it works, the only other fix people mentioned was to reset windows 10.)

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Don't do an OS reset, just go download the full OS and do a reinstall from the media.
Doing that will will always push the previous data to Windows_Old folder structure.

Plus if your Win10 for example is older then around Aug 2016, you want to redownload it to get the very latest version/build for doing a clean install anyways; avoiding needless updates.