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Steam had an option to recover a game from a backup for a long time. If you really needed this you knew about it. This new feature seems to just save a few clicks and the need for a shared drive / flash drive.

It still doesn't help me with games releasing a 20 GB patch every 7 days unfortunately.

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Unfortunately it doesn’t work so well with some larger games. I tried backing up a 120GB up-to-date game, uninstalling and reinstalling steam (to a newly purchased drive), and reloading the game from backup. It still wanted to download 90GB.

Yep, back around 15 years ago when I had data caps I used to use that feature all the time. Not to copy games between PCs, but to have backups in case I reinstalled Windows etc so I wouldn't have to download them again.

The feature's still there: Right-click a game in your library -> Properties -> Local Files tab -> Backup game files.

It creates sort of an installer with all the files in it. It's less useful in these days of frequent patches though, because the game will still have to download any newer updates after installing.

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