GOG is a DRM-Free store who's Unique Selling Point is the offline installers. You can download them once, back them up and that's it. You don't need to redownload if you reinstall / replay in future, and if the worst happens and the store ever closes you can carry on playing them for years / decades by reinstalling them locally (from a backup drive).

I got it now I need to backup my games so I can restore them in the future... Thank you for helping me understand.

17

attached pic.

Purged a lot of installation as i decided to only have games i will play and i also only have 2 500gb ssds. so space is limited.

1. Next to play.
2. Finished, but some achievements are broken. Will probably never be fixed, but keeping it around for now just in case.
3. Indefinite hiatus. Achievements have been broken for ages. Will likely end up playing as-is, at some point in the future.
4. Indefinite hiatus. Lost interest.
5. Indefinite hiatus. Would like to resume by year's end.

7. Or 6 actually installed, since one was an Indiegala freebie, so portable, just unzipped.

The one I just restarted playing a couple of days ago was one I had last put on hold back in August of 2015, keept it around ever since, always meaning to try again and never doing it till now. Then there's the one I have mostly been playing this year, but put it on hold a month ago. Another is one I'm just occasionally having a quick game of. Two others I played at some point but put on hold last June and, respectively, last March. The portable one I just started in August of 2020 and dropped. And the last one I'm just keeping because I still have a pending correction submitted on Mobygames since I finished it last August, the corrections queue there being as long and generally low priority as it is, so keep it in case I'll need to verify something again.

Total size: 11.5 GB. The one put on hold last June making up half of that.

What??? Are you serious?

Thats probably a world record :)

Indeed serious :) I have five external hard rives ranging from 8TB to 12 TB. Four of the five are 85%-90% filled. The fifth is almost 50%

Not counting Abandonware games, zoom platform, Unisoft, Origin, and others.

Creating an archive, mainly for my kids. I want them to have a myriad of choices when they get old enough to play. Have 4 boys under 4 lol lol

You can check my Steam library too. I use this same user name over there.

Correct. However the game folders themselves, once installed, are technically the installers themselves. Just compress them and bam you have the game in a zip file. Have done it thousands of times. Works everytime. Works easier than downloading 17 backup installers for one game lol

Oh but of course I am worried about system crash and OS Drive breaking. However more so the latter than the former. Eventually I will have to replace the drives. That will take time indeed.

But yes, with all the games I have installed that are through the clients as stated above or by some abandonware site, I am just a few under 7 thousand installed. These aren't desktop games either or some trash games.

These are very good quality games even if to some they may not be due to age.

But you can look at my library here and on Steam. (Same User name) and see for yourself what I have. Just let me know if you can't see the library or not.

I would also have more time played on these games but with being married and four kids under four, it's hard to get some game time.

I appreciate your passion and enthusiasm towards it. Most people don't and I'm right in the boat with you on people thinking I'm crazy.

Around 64 properly installed (more than I'd like, given that I keep shortcuts to most of them on my desktop), and roughly another 27 unpacked and ready to play. (This is not counting a handful of older titles that need slightly more effort than just clicking an icon to run each time, as well as a bunch of browser games from the Flashpoint project, and a whole '90s shareware disk I dumped on my hard drive years ago.)

608 GOGames + an assortment of others.

Interesting timing. I just spent a silly amount of time downloading a ton, dedicating my recent 2TB SSD addition as my GOG-only drive - my previous 1TB drive I'm using for my Game Pass and other store/client games. This way I can really just pick and choose when feeling like playing something in particular. ;)
Eh. They're nice to have, but for me the most important thing is being able to keep playing without any fuss due to no required online-tether. That came in very handy last week when GOG's servers shit the bed.

These ones. Not counting DOSBox and emulation, of course...

*Currently playing just the lowest fours. And sometimes just Elden Ring until 4:00 in the morning. I wake up at 8:30 to go to work*

89 games according to Galaxy, which (along with my spreadsheet) is helping me get through the backlog. Everything that I have marked playing or installed on my spreadsheet plus Dorfromantik and Neverwinter Nights.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sbYtmxQA3jOUYptwJi_1blD2L3hXXLIi/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=112882206293283405691&rtpof=true&sd=true

The stuff marked DELETE really is getting deleted the next time I access the backup drive. There's no need to keep backups of things I don't like (or in the case of Gourmania, doesn't work correctly.) If I'm just not in the mood for something, it gets uninstalled and tossed back into the backlog.

There's "installed" and installed. The former is the technically installed titles which is ... I dunno 60 or something installed on an external drive, primarily EGS titles (ready to be tested for client-independence and played at a later date). The latter is the games I have installed on the main drive of my gaming rig which numbers 4 at the moment - they're the ones currently "in progress".

I don't see the point of cluttering up my main internal drives with dozens of games. When I want to finally play one I'll install/unpack the game from storage.

13:

Annalyn
Arthurian Legends
Bayonetta
Black Widow: Recharged
Blade of Darkness
Blazing Chrome
Galacticon
Mother Russia Bleeds
Nox (just installed this yesterday to check out OpenNox)
Potatoman Seeks the Troof
Witchaven
Witcher 3
Xenocrisis