I HAVE. EVERYONE SHOULD DO IT.

Of course there might be issues when thousands upon thousands rush to download their games at the same time, hence doing it beforehand makes sense (in case one cares enough of their games; I know there are also people who just wouldn't care).

I guess Desura and DotEmu are two relatively recent examples. I didn't have a Desura account, but I recall some downloaders complaining about slow download speeds when they were all rushing to download their stuff at the same time.

DotEmu... I think the download speeds there were slower than normal (after they announced they are closing their store and give some time for people to download their games), but I guess overall it went pretty clean. Then again, somehow I feel DotEmu didn't have so many active users anymore anyway, I presume its userbase was much smaller than e.g. GOG. I had my DotEmu installers backed up already beforehand, but I still crosschecked upon the closure that I had the latest versions of them.

Besides the "preparing for the store closure"-point, I guess keeping backups beforehand may occasionally offer some other benefits, like if you find out some game got replaced with an inferior version (mainly I recall e.g. some GTA games on Steam suddenly losing part of their soundtracks), which may make you feel happy you had a backup of the earlier version, but maybe these cases are quite rare. Usually the newer the installer is, the better it is, I guess.

I always think offline backup is common sense.
But young people (and some people that are not so young) always wonders me that they trust "cloud" so much.

No, cloud is not backup.

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SAME HERE. THE ONLY ONE'S I HAVEN'T DOWNLOADED YET ARE:
- PHARAONIC (WHICH I BOUGHT TODAY)
- PLANESCAPE TORMENT EE (WHICH I BOUGHT TWO DAYS AGO)
- SOME 9 GAMES WHICH HAVE APPARENTLY RECEIVED SOME UPDATES LATELY, IE. I HAVE AN OLDER VERSION OF THEM.

WE ARE TALKING ABOUT 1453 GAMES HERE. YEAH BABY YEAH.

Quake The Offering that is released here originally had its soundtrack included (the music that plays in game), until GOG where forced to remove it due to copyright issues I think. That was done via a setup update. Luckly its easy enough to add the music back into it.

While understand, and acknowledge, the need for backing up the games, it is realistically impratical.

* I have 870+ games, to amount for a terabyte. Even more?
* So many things to download, that it could become a pain to backup everything
* Games get updates... again, backup those.
* Even the backup can get broken, as it happened to me twice in the past.
** You should backup the backup. Ha!

Have fun with this philosophical nonsense.

Don't worry. I have backed up your games as well.

I would argue that cloud is a form of backup; if your computer and local backup were to both fail (for example, a burglary or natural disaster), but you happen to remember your password and the cloud service is still online, you can retrieve your data from the cloud service.

With that said, it is possible for the cloud service to fail, so it's good to keep a local backup just in case; you never know when you might need it. Plus, local backup is usually faster (there may be some cases where it isn't).

If the data is really important to you, you might even go further and keep several extra backups. Get extra hard drives and ship them to locations you trust, purchase multiple online backup services (make sure they're located in different areas geographically, just in case a disaster happens in one area), and make multiple backups. If you're worried about your data getting into the wrong hands (or if you have regulations to comply with that limit what you can do with the data), encrypt it (but be careful not to lose the encryption key!).

Also, it's a good idea to test those backups; having your backup fail when you need it most is *not* fun (but fortunately a situation I have *yet* to encounter).

It's problematic if you haven't DLed your game files yet. I tend to DL them as soon as I buy the games. Then I grab patches when they're updated. And gogrepo also keeps your game files up to date, if you run that on a regular basis. Depends on your situation, but I find it easy to keep my game files backed up. But I also have a great internet connection, which not everyone has, making it even harder to keep regularly updated backups.

It's easy to amass a large game library with sales, freebies, and regular purchases. I have more free games from GOG than you have in total, and have gotten tons of games in cheap Humble Bundles, as well as a lot of freebie Steam keys from various giveaways, so you can see how a library could grow pretty quickly.

gogrepo (and I presume lgogdownloader) makes all those easy as a breeze. Just a couple of commands, and it downloads everything you haven't yet downloaded, including updated ones.

Anyway, to each his own. I can certainly understand the people who don't feel like backing up their games, at least not for now.

gogrepo lets you verify all your downloaded installers for integrity (that they are still ok). And of course there are other tools too like rhash or dvdsig.

As for keeping backups of backups... my philosophy for now is that as long as GOG is up and running, the games on my GOG account are my "cloud backup", hence it is enough I keep only a single local backup of them. If that hard drive suddenly dies, oh well, I guess I'd need to download them all over again (with gogrepo).

However, if and when GOG went the way of e.g. DotEmu (or Desura) and closed its doors, then I would probably keep two local backups of my GOG games, as I wouldn't have the "cloud backup" on GOG servers anymore. Just like with my DotEmu installers, I have them on two or three hard drives as I can't redownload them from DotEmu servers anymore.

And no I don't generally consider Piratebay or such as my "online backups". They'd be trying to push malware with modified GOG installers anyway. :)

NO, HAVE YOU TIMPPU? :P We seem to have a passive-aggressive relationship.

I don't have money for an extra external hard drive right now, so that's why I haven't done it yet.

Ha! I knew it! I just find it "odd" that you'd remind others to do something that you don't do yourself. What's the hidden agenda here, huh? :P

Yeah, I have backed up 99.99% (or thereabouts) of my GOG games. Two of my latest purchases are yet to be downloaded, and there are a few others which have received updates lately (which I haven't downloaded yet).

My Steam games... those I haven't backed up. That would certainly be too much work for me, starting from trying to figure out which of my Steam games can be backed up anyway (ie. are DRM-free), and what extra steps are needed for each of them. like renaming some steam dlls or whatever... Too many hoops, too cumbersome.