Steam – get the Steam categories back

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During the Holiday sales, I logged in to Steam on a different computer (one powerful enough to actually run my games :). When I logged back in on my notebook, all of my categories except one were deleted, and all of the games except one were removed from my favourites and from the one remaining category. I re-added some of them.

Later, after logging in again, I lost all my groups and favourites again.
Is this behaviour common? Can I get them back, or at least back them up in the future?

edit: yesterday's patch (7. 10. 2015) seems to address this bug (release notes here):

Fixed bug causing category info to be missing from the Library in
Offline Mode, and sometimes cleared permanently when going back online

Took at least 3 years, it seems.

(I have read this, but I'm not sure it's the exact same problem. Both my computers ran Windows and I lost my categorization entirely.)

Best Answer

I know this is an old question, but for future generations:

Copy Steam_directory/userdata/your_long_number/7/remote/sharedconfig.vdf between computers or back it up.

Steam_directory is~/.local/share/Steam/ on linux, ~/Library/Application Support/Steam on mac, and wherever you chose to install Steam on windows (usually C:\Program Files\Steam or C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam).

Related Solutions

Steam – How to disable Steam from starting up with Windows without logging in to Steam

If you want to do this without starting Steam and logging in, you can modify the setting in the Windows registry. The autostart checkbox is directly tied to a registry key — simply deleting it is all the Steam client does when said checkbox is unchecked.

Navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and delete the Steam key. Or as a .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"Steam"=-

Steam – Why did Steam erase all the games

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.

Best Answer

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Steam – How to disable Steam from starting up with Windows without logging in to Steam

Steam – Why did Steam erase all the games

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