protonscr

Steam redownloads games on external drive when shared between Windows and Linux

steamclosed duplicatereviewed
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#3288 · opened 2014-05-08 by amcn · updated 2014-08-13 · 2 comments · github
Aamcn 2014-05-08 github

When I log into Steam in Linux and then log out, reboot into Windows and log into Steam, once I am logged into Steam on Windows the Steam client seems to think that a huge number of games need to be updated, and it proceeds to download each game entirely.

This can cause hundreds of gigabytes to be downloaded unnecessarily.

I think Steam on Linux may be truncating some important file(s) and then the Windows client then thinks there is a file corruption or that the file is missing.

All the games that this affects are stored on an external hard drive, formatted to NTFS.

Observed with Windows 8 and Arch Linux; Linux rootfs is formatted EXT4. Kernel currently is 3.14, although this has been happening for a good year or so, so its common to a number of kernels.

If any more information is needed let me know.

Steps to reproduce:

This probably requires games to be installed on an external drive whch is then mounted as read-write in both OSes.

  1. Open Steam Linux client
  2. Close Steam Linux client
  3. Shutdown machine and reboot into Windows
  4. Open Steam Windows client
  5. Steam reports that many games need to be updated

Linux system info
Windows system info

Ggdrewb-valve maintainer 2014-05-08 github

You can't use the same Steam app storage for different operating systems. See #123 and several others. Also #3189 is open as a feature request. Closing as duplicate.

?ghost 2014-08-13 github

I have the same issue.

With separeted library folders (SteamLibraryWIN for windows and SteamLibrary for linux)

Nothing extracted yet.