protonscr

Recover broken .acf files

steamopen questionreviewed
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#3665 · opened 2015-01-10 by altitude · updated 2026-04-18 · 2 comments · github
Aaltitude 2015-01-10 github

Yesterday I was playing Borderlands 2. Today the Steam client wants me to install it.

When launching the client from a shell, I get some interesting output about an  appmanifest_49520.acf file, which I believe has something to do with Borderlands 2 according to this

Error while parsing text KeyValues for resource /home/superzamp/.local/share/Steam/steamap /appmanifest_49520.acf

Here's a gist with the full client output and said appmanifest file.

Here is any way to recover the game without downloading it all over again ?

Thanks.

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2018-05-25 github

Hello @altitude, quite belated but Steam attempts to discover existing game files during the install process, so if you tell Steam to install to the game to a steamapps folder that already has the game, it should skip downloading files which match what's on Steam's servers.

Rrusgasclo 2026-04-18 github

I know this is an old question but I've had an issue where I needed to restore my .acf files and came across this repository
https://github.com/xandyxor/SteamLibraryRescuer
I've translated the comments and prompts and made minor enhancements to the code. It might not fix all .acf files but it should fix a chunk of them.
https://github.com/rusgasclo/SteamLibraryRescuer

Nothing extracted yet.