Atomic Systems

Hi Guys
I'm currently running windows XP on my pc with railworks loaded on it. I'm planning to change to windows 7 in the near future which will mean reinstalling everything. Is there a way I can save all my current railworks and then bring it all back again when the new operating system is installed? My pc has 2 hard drives installed. I don't want to loose all my downloads etc if at all possible. What is the best way of carrying out this tasks?

Any help would be much appreciated thanks


Andy

When I changed my computer in the TS2012 days I made a backup of it to DVD which you can do through Steam. When I got my new computer I just reinstalled TS2012 from the DVDs and the first time I used it, it redownloaded all my DLC. I reinstalled all my freeware over a period of time.

When I made the change I simply moved my railworks folder to a seperate hard drive, once windows 7 was installed I reinstalled steam, downloaded railworks, then copied over my railworks folder from the other drive over the fresh install. Long winded but gave me back my mods, freeware, 3rd party dlc etc.

All you really need is a copy of your Assets and Contents folders, on a spare drive or DVD . You could compress them with 7-zip if you were short of space.
Install the new OS, install Steam preferably outside of Program Files and rather than let Steam download everything again just pause the download, copy over your old folders and run the verify routine.

Tried pausing steam myself, but it didn't work. In the end I had to allow a full download, and then copy over. In my case I avoided a verify because of the amount of mods I have. AP, TTB, Steam Supreme etc. In the end I renamed the fresh download and kept it as a clean copy ready for the next major update.

The preferred method (if you have the space) is to copy the "SteamApps" folder and steam.exe to a back-up device, then copy these onto the new machine/install into a new, empty directory (say under C:\Steam) and run the .exe.

This means that the .exe creates a Steam install and also recognises the files have already been downloaded - you simply log back into your Steam account (activating the new system as a trusted one) and bob's your uncle.