How to take backup of steam games on mac OS

[Anne Heche]

Hey I used to play steam games on my machine running mac operating system, but I was just speculating as can we take backup your steam games installed in PC or to any removable media source, and then copy the game to another machine without downloading the whole game again to that PC. And off course the main problems are regarding the saved game, I mean to say if something happens wrong then all those games get deleted. So is there any way to take backup ?

[Adonis]

Yeah off course you can do that as there are multiple option too, and let me tell you that operating system doesn’t matter By the way. But as if you are saying about the whole game, thus about that I am not sure that you can make backup of the data for that, because as the extent to I know The binaries for the games are dissimilar and the majority of the games data are packaged differently for the each game.

[Wyvern]

Yeah I am completely agree with the above user as you cannot backup the whole game rather you can have option to take backup of the save games, so you can transfer then to another machine, and can play with that stat only. and that you can backup on your hard drive and the USB flash drive itself. You just need to copy those data from the my documents to the pen drive and then can move wherever you go.

[Anne Heche]

Hey thanks for the help, I was also stuck there only and was bit unsure about the fact, but though I just transfer saved game data to my USB drive and then transfer it to another location then also I am not able to access those data, as the game say I must have to start with the new profiles? Now what will be the problem, because as you have mentioned that OS doesn’t matter then what is the problem here, any idea?

[Squibbit]

I always play the game this way only as I have two machine at my place, and it works perfectly, but I think you need to have Your flash drive to be FAT32 formatted for both OS to read and write, I mean to say whenever you format your USB drive with any OS, make sure that you select the file system which is there where you want to play that game actually, because there some read write protection on this.

[RockOn]

Yeah this is the good idea as through which we can simply minimize the time for downloading the game again, and this is too simple as well, you just need to Copy the GCF files from the SteamApps folder and as soon as you do this place them into the ~/Steam Content/ folder, I am not mentioning the whole directory as that would be different in your machine, but no need to worry as you just need to copy the files, after that a few of them will not be used by the Mac though, so you have to make sure that which ones are irrelevant files and you got that delete them. And when you install the game on the machine running mac OS it will only download the content regarding the mac OS and will use all other shared content.

[RyanInt]

I am not getting actually what you want to do exactly, are you planning to use the game on mac which you’re running on other windows, isn’t it? If yes then I have some suggestion for you, you can make use of that, as first stimulate source engine files and the game files from Steampps to Mac, but when you about to open the steam it will keep displaying starting download page but for that use can use some tricks for avoiding downloading and running the one that you have. Open the steam folder an then open the terminal window and type the following code :

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam

Make sure you can access these files your Mac user name:

chown -R [your_user_name]:staff SteamApps/

figure out that the general group staff can read and write files.

chmod -R g+xr SteamApps/

After doing these you should restart the steam and there you are ready to play the game without downloading it.