STEAM Cache Files

[ave]

Every now and then, even following these steps, you'll still need an update.

I've seen it go 0/2400mb (or something), it'll download the first 10mb, then detect the rest.

it wasn't consistent. sometimes it would download a little and then find the rest, but more often than not I would come back later and it had downloaded 500mb or something stupid and still hadn't found anything. At least by transferring the .acf file it worked consistently.

[VirtualForce]

Are you guys by any chance in the Steam beta participation?

you, I'm on beta.

[mottamort]

you, I'm on beta.

Wonder if thats involved...I WAS on beta for the streaming thing, then my steam was randomly crashing (silently, just closes) so I opted out about a month ago

[StaggerLee]

It started a couple of months ago- around the same time that steam changed their site around. I download all my games on one pc, which I leave on over night, and then transfer them to my gaming PC, and being a compulsive game-buyer-holic I do this a lot. What I found is that some games were installing normally, but if I was transferring 10, maybe 6 or 7 wouldn't install properly. The game files would be there, but it would try download them again, and it doesn't matter what I did, it just didn't want to see them.

I have to say, this sounds very weird. I use a Telkom mobile 10Gig+10Gig account, meaning that I have maximum 20Gigs every month with which to download, update, browse, everything. I am forced to ask friends and family for Steam files on nearly a weekly basis. 9 times out of 10, I will simply get the cache files and then have Steam detect them manually, the rest of the time I will use backups. I've probably had two games that refused to install from the files and that was probably because the files I had were out of date. I literally have hundreds of Steam games and plenty of those have been installed this way. Mortal Kombat X, which I expected to be particularly troublesome, even installed fine from cache files. I installed that about two weeks ago.

I know that if you start an install before moving the files into SteamApps then Steam will want to download the entire thing., but otherwise it shouldn't be a problem. If you are still having problems with these installations, it may be a PC-specific issue or something strange with Steam, a bug maybe?

[murfle]

it wasn't consistent. sometimes it would download a little and then find the rest, but more often than not I would come back later and it had downloaded 500mb or something stupid and still hadn't found anything. At least by transferring the .acf file it worked consistently.

Most the time, ya... That 10mb thing I mentioned was with the acf. We were trying to do this, and my friend couldn't understand why I call Steam "A delicate beast" until they saw it for themselves...

[mottamort]

I just bought Modern Warfare 2 (im a sucker for co-op and recently mate saw his physical copy cd key becomes steam key), and i used my *cough* test version to move files to steam. Teamviewered into my home machine, copied files to steamapps/common, deleted my exe's hehe, and its just "downloaded" about 10gb in 3 minutes. So non-beta definitely seem to still be working as it always has been. Sorry to hear yours is giving issues on occasion :/