SargonAelther: Hi,

I would say that there's no need to choose between offline installers and Galaxy. You can use both. Galaxy itself can download offline installers for you, which will be more convenient than via a browser.

Your Offline installers can be downloaded here.
If you've never been here before, after selecting a game, you will need to "expand" the "DOWNLOAD OFFLINE BACKUP GAME INSTALLERS" section, because it is minimised the first time, probably as a sneaky way to make people think that Galaxy (Big blue button) is the only way.

I would personally not keep game installers among games themselves, because I find that messy, but you can if you really want to. It will not cause issues.

Galaxy will store offline installers and goodies in the folder that can be selected here: Galaxy > Settings > Installing, updating > Other downloads folder.
To download actual game installers via Galaxy, select a game, then go to extras, just to the left of the Play button. There you will see extras and downloads. If a game is large with many parts, Galaxy will be more convenient than a browser, because it will download all those parts as a single download. Regardless of the download method, make sure you always download and keep ALL PARTS of the installer. They will be labelled such as (Part 1 of 4), (Part 2 of 4), or Whatever.exe, Whatever-1.bin, Whatever-2.bin, etc. You need all those bin files. Patches are optional. You can either re-download the full installer every time it gets updated, or only download patches. Depends on your internet allowance.

You can absolutely move your downloaded offline installers to an external drive, once they're downloaded. If you keep this external drive connected to your PC all the time, you could even download straight to it, as well as set the Other downloads folder to that external drive.

And yes, I would absolutely recommend downloading everything that you buy, should something bad ever happen to GOG or your account. That is the beauty of GOG that Steam won't give you. At the same time, GOG Galaxy gives you modern fluff like cloud saves and achievements, so GOG offers the best of both worlds. You get modern features and a sense of ownership. You don't have to choose one or the other.

Now once your library grows into hundreds, Galaxy, and especially a browser, may be no longer be fit for purpose when it comes to managing so many offline installers and their updates. That's where community scripts come into play, but I would not worry about that yet, if you're just starting out.

If you do decide to ditch Galaxy and go browser-only with offline installers, look out for blue dots on some games. They indicate that the game has been updated and you should download patches, or re-download the installer. You can also filter to show only updated games, by clicking the drop down button next to "MY COLLECTION".

Ancient-Red-Dragon: Galaxy is way way way better for downloading offline installers than the website is, because by doing it through the website, you have to manually click every single file, whereas doing it with Galaxy results in you need to do much much much fewer clicks in order to get the same files.

Also, there is a mismatch between file numbers as are displayed on the GOG website, versus the actual file numbers in the file names of the files that you manually download from the GOG website, which results in confusion and can easily lead to you making mistakes via human error, and accidentally missing not downloading some of your files correctly...all of which is more reason to use Galaxy to download your offline installers, instead of using the GOG website itself.

Even if you don't want to use Galaxy at all in order to play your games, you are still way better off using Galaxy solely to download your games, than you would be using the GOG website to download your games.

SargonAelther: Hi,

I would say that there's no need to choose between offline installers and Galaxy. You can use both. Galaxy itself can download offline installers for you, which will be more convenient than via a browser.

Your Offline installers can be downloaded here.
If you've never been here before, after selecting a game, you will need to "expand" the "DOWNLOAD OFFLINE BACKUP GAME INSTALLERS" section, because it is minimised the first time, probably as a sneaky way to make people think that Galaxy (Big blue button) is the only way.

I would personally not keep game installers among games themselves, because I find that messy, but you can if you really want to. It will not cause issues.

Galaxy will store offline installers and goodies in the folder that can be selected here: Galaxy > Settings > Installing, updating > Other downloads folder.
To download actual game installers via Galaxy, select a game, then go to extras, just to the left of the Play button. There you will see extras and downloads. If a game is large with many parts, Galaxy will be more convenient than a browser, because it will download all those parts as a single download. Regardless of the download method, make sure you always download and keep ALL PARTS of the installer. They will be labelled such as (Part 1 of 4), (Part 2 of 4), or Whatever.exe, Whatever-1.bin, Whatever-2.bin, etc. You need all those bin files. Patches are optional. You can either re-download the full installer every time it gets updated, or only download patches. Depends on your internet allowance.

You can absolutely move your downloaded offline installers to an external drive, once they're downloaded. If you keep this external drive connected to your PC all the time, you could even download straight to it, as well as set the Other downloads folder to that external drive.

And yes, I would absolutely recommend downloading everything that you buy, should something bad ever happen to GOG or your account. That is the beauty of GOG that Steam won't give you. At the same time, GOG Galaxy gives you modern fluff like cloud saves and achievements, so GOG offers the best of both worlds. You get modern features and a sense of ownership. You don't have to choose one or the other.

Now once your library grows into hundreds, Galaxy, and especially a browser, may be no longer be fit for purpose when it comes to managing so many offline installers and their updates. That's where community scripts come into play, but I would not worry about that yet, if you're just starting out.

If you do decide to ditch Galaxy and go browser-only with offline installers, look out for blue dots on some games. They indicate that the game has been updated and you should download patches, or re-download the installer. You can also filter to show only updated games, by clicking the drop down button next to "MY COLLECTION".

kzadur: To add a bit of habit if you also want to/keep playing within from Galaxy: Install from your backup installers to the standard game installation location of your galaxy games. No need to download twice or in parallel. They will be immediately shown as installed.

ameder: So... download the installers somewhere, say an external drive, the install to my GOG Galaxy folder. Would the backup installers still exist where I downloaded them? Meaning, after installing Would those installer files be usable later?

ameder: Amazing response! Exactly what I was looking for.
I kinda like Galaxy so... I'll download and play via that, but pull down all installers to a backup location.