As mentioned in the last post, I got a new PC, but what do you do with the old PC? In this case I’m selling it to a family member who is younger, going to university, and whose game usage is much less graphically intensive than mine. Passing on savings is also a nice thing to do, especially for family.
Backing up whatever you have on the computer is of course the first step. I rounded up what I needed to move and dropped it on to my NAS, which you can read about here.
After that, it’s going to be a matter of pulling out a few things from the old PC and putting a few things back in. SSDs are being swapped, and the WiFi card is going back in, because there’s no guarantee of easy Ethernet access in the dorms.
I’ll be removing my 4TB Crucial disk on a Startech adapter, paired with a few m.2 SATA Samsung Evo 960s in 250GB flavor. This will probably get broken down into the big drive itself and mounted on the new PC’s motherboard, which has an incredible 5 m.2 slots. I’m sending the old PC away with a 500GB and 1TB SSD, which should do very nicely.
One of the handy features of Steam’s library management is the ability to add disks, then move games between them. This usually has little consequence, though there’s usually the new install prompts once again and some settings may reset. My experience has been very positive, and I’ve been filling the big drive with all of those downloaded games that I want to maintain.
Don’t forget, however, to back up your Documents folder, as it has a lot of the save game files that some older games do not back up in Steam Cloud. One of my favorite go-to games, Crysis 2, works like this. It seems that some of the stats are backed up, but none of the saves and other small things.
I also like taking game screenshots while playing games and while I used to back these up to Steam, I stopped doing that and instead copy them to Google Photos and put them in an album. It’s kinda like a “what was I doing / playing / feeling like” in that month or season. Fun to look back on at times. Steam makes it pretty easy to find these on the disk from their interface when you open a screenshot, right click on it, and select the option to show it on disk.
One of the other interesting things about backing up a computer you’ve had in place for 5 years is that you find out what’s been using space. I’d had a Premiere Pro folder with 24GB of audio preview files, and it wasn’t even the newest version. Those were simply abandoned by the software and left. I’d also had a few Audacity mixtape projects using 15GB that I’d forgotten about.