Steam

[Milambar]

Anyone who uses Steam a lot, I'd keep an eye on a folder called SteamApps, which is a subfolder in your main Steam folder.

I was getting a lot of low disk warnings today, so I used a free program that gave me a list of folders in order of size. Steam was the single biggest folder (over 155GB), of which nearly all that was the SteamApps subfolder.

This was disproportionate, considering I only had a single game from steam installed. I posted on the steam forums and apparently, even when you delete the actual games (delete local content), it doesn't remove maps, or saves which are stored in SteamApps, therefore the folder can grow to a huge size.

The only safe solution is to uninstall steam, and reinstall it, apparently.

[adzii_nufc]

You can delete anything in the steamapps section and simply re-install it if needed.

Done it multiple times.

[Graham M]

You can quite happily delete data from the steam apps folder and steam is quite good at making it fairly obvious what it is to do with, but obviously bear in mind that games which use the half life 2 engine will require that to remain to function.

Also another thing, to prevent you having to redownload the game is to back the relevant files up to another hard drive, then you can just copy them back into place when you want to start playing again.

Also, if you need to reformat the hard drive, steam will quite happily be backed up and reassert itself on the target computer by simply running the steam.exe. Also if you do reinstall steam from scratch it will happily take a backed up copy of the steamapps folder and make the contained games available to that copy of steam (but obviously only if the logged in user owns them)

So whoever has informed you that the only way to deal with these problems is to reinstall steam is mistaken (happily)