Joakim Christiansen wrote:Why do you need backups?
I would only care about backing up the savegames, the games can be redownloaded for free if anything were to happen.
But yeah, Steam is a nice way to waste money!
I play a lot of big title games, that can be anywhere from 8 - 20GB in size (estimate for the high end). I already got us in trouble by exceeding out bandwidth limit 3 months in a row, last year.
My current backup folder of 34 games from Steam (what I can fit on my 100GB games partition) is 36.8GB. My 100GB games partition has 6GB free currently (not only Steam Games installed).
The Witcher 2, just by itself is almost 20GB in size. My currently installed Games on Steam make its appcache folder alone 50GB on the nose. And I still have another 30 or so games I could install.
I recently bought the Splinter Cell Conviction Pack (all games in the series) which will require 23GB just for those 4 games.
Dead Island will need another 10GB or so.
Bottom line is, I cannot afford to have to redownload games after a catastrophic failure. To do so at once would eat up over 100GB of bandwidth. Breaking it up over several months would force me to prioritize what games I want back first.
All the above aside? I am an avid "archivist". I have several Terrabytes of data already. I am in the process of putting my old PC parts I upgraded from recently, back together to create a second PC, which will act as a Redudant Storage File Server, and let me do some other stuff like play my vast collection of ROMS, or Video files on my TV.
I have plenty of room to store these backups, along with all the other CD/DVD images I have for my programs and game discs.
In fact UPS just now delivered my order from Newegg. So I have a 250GB Velociraptor that will now function as my dedicated gaming installs drive. It was a real kick in the nuts that Newegg dropped the price on the 256GB Vertex 4 SSD the day after I ordered this (yesterday), as it is now a price I would have considered paying. So I hope its not as noisy as some people claim it will be.. Some claim their VRaptors are whisper quiet, or that its only the heads that make noise when active, and that they do run pretty cool but not blistering hot.
I guess we'll see.. I've been itching to get my 10TB RAID server up and running for a while now. I just hope the raptor provides enough space for my current needs. If its quiet and cool running, I can get another later on and RAID-0 them for 500GB.
The best advantage of keeping a backup like this, aside from data security, is I don't have to wait for a huge game to download, so it saved both my bandwidth AND my time.
Granted, I only purchase sale items, and try to buy Packs that are on sale only.. But it started with Ys Origin, and Felghana (I love the Ys series and hope XSeeD does Steam releases for all of the previous games and future ones too).
