I was downloading a Steam game with terribly slow wifi. I managed to downloaded 6.5 gigabytes out of the 12.5 then shut off my computer because I thought steam would pause it (at previous questions asked about it) But then when I get back on I see it say 125 MEGABYTES. Now it says I have 12-14 hours of download time left and I dont have that kind of time. It doesent matter if it can be fixed, I really just want to know if its a known bug or its being fixed by steam, Thank you.
Steam – Closed down Steam while downloading a game
steam
Related Solutions
Global option
You can now allow downloads during any gameplay from the downloads settings:
Per game option
You can now tell Steam to continue downloading updates/games while playing games from your games' properties. Note that this setting is not available for non-steam games, which will always use the global setting.
I know of only one way that this can happen in windows, and has nothing to do with Steam other than their not-so-great decision to install all content into Program Files.
If you are on Windows 7 or Windows Vista, and you have UAC set to ON, then change it later to OFF, this can happen.
UAC does thing evil thing where if a program tries to write to a "protected" area like Program Files, EVEN IF YOU ARE ADMINISTRATOR, when you get a UAC prompt and give permission, it actually writes any files that would normally go into that directory into a "virtualized" directory somewhere else.
If you turn off UAC, that will no longer happen, and as an awesome bonus, it will no longer know about the files that it virtualized.
So in your case, if you had UAC on, installed a ton of games, then later got sick of UAC and turned it off, this would happen as you described.
See the second paragraph in "Features" in the article on User Account Control.
If you have done this and turn on UAC again, your content will come back, but be a TOTAL mess because if you've downloaded more stuff with UAC off, then that will be invisible when you turn UAC on, and vice versa.
this drove me a little crazy once before I realized what was happening.
i'm curious to know if this is your issue.
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Best Answer
Closing steam while downloading an application and resuming the download later without losing progress is a feature that is supported by steam. Steam will pause the download when closed and automatically restart it when opened again.
So to answer your question, this is not a known bug and it isn't being fixed by steam currently.
In order for steam to restart the download it needs to have access to the games Local Content. If these files aren't in the file system then it'll have to restart the download. Try navigating to your steam Library folder and see if these files exist. If they do, point steam to them.
If the files don't exist it's possible that your operating system handled them in an unexpected way. This could be the result of countless different variables though. Either way it may be worth submitting a bug request to steam if they aren't there.
Edit: I did some more research on this this morning and found a work around that may of use to you. If your Local Content for the game is available in your file system you should be able to force steam to restart the download where it left off last by copying the downloaded portion from your C:\steam\steamapps\downloading\ folder to your C:\steam\steamapps\common\ folder.
Here's detailed instructions for doing so