Sure thing russellskanne: I am interested :)
Thanks in advance!

I know this is an old thread but I appreciate the updates. As a quick question, if I backed up my steam folder without putting into offline mode first, what is the likelihood of this process not working?

Excellent. (Thanks for replying. :)

Fact is always welcome when so much misinformation abounds.
See above.

Empirical data is always welcome.

edit: made a mistake, will repost later

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This should not work. But you can try it yourself. Just put the mentioned steam.cfg into your Steam folder and start Steam. If it requires you to login online, it obviously doesn't work.

Thanks a ton russellskanne :)

So here are the (simplified) batch scripts I'm using. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.
(for additional info, see the comments in the scripts)

SteamBackup.cmd:
-uses 7z to zip the client without game data and exports Steam registry keys
-paths to Steam, Backupfolder and 7z must be set correctly in the configuration section

SteamStart.cmd:
-paths to Steam must be set correctly in the configuration section
-place steam.cfg_offline, your own modified loginusers.vdf_offline and loginusers.vdf_online into the folder where the script resides
-make a shortcut to SteamStart.cmd with "offline" and/or "offline" as argument to start steam
accordingly

Thanks for the response, I'll probably just create a new backup to be sure. In the interest of futureproofing games libraries as much as possible, do you know if there exists methods to run games offline on other computers for other launchers such as Uplay, Origin and even EGS?

I know a much better solution....

how about not buying on steam at the first place???!!!!!!..
works 100% all day all night

I never used any of these beside steam. But according to info on PCGamingWiki their offline modes, if available, are quite limited.

I was wrong here. It will work just fine. (I've tested it again). Since I only start automatically into offline mode on my systems I totally forgot that you can actually "login" via credentials as you would login online. Sorry for the misinformation.

Btw. I've made some edits to [url=https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Store:Steam#Offline_Mode]https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Store:Steam#Offline_Mode[/url] that cover the most important info on this matter.

Awesome. Thanks for the followup. I'll keep my backup as is for now but next time I do a full dump I'll put it offline just to be sure.

Hello, another question to the OP or russellskanne.

Let's say I backup my Steam folder with no games at all in computer A. Then, in computer B I download Steam and use the same user account to download some games and play them. Then I zip the game folders.

Can I install in computer C the Steam folder from computer A and the games from computer B and play offline? (everything with the same user account).

In other words: does the Steam folder know anything about the games you have downloaded at that time? or will it just load all games present in the library?

Yeah, that should work as long as you didn't buy/add new games to your steam library on computer B. Those new ones wouldn't be visible on computer C.
It's the same as restoring an older Steam backup, where you would only able to play those games that where "known" by steam by the time of the backup.

Thanks for answering! BTW, I'm looking at your scripts, they're cool! Have you thought creating a gh repo?

Regarding the full/light zips, should I just remove the one that I'm not interested in? Any advantages of full vs light?

Ah, damn, with the upcoming Steam stopping supporting Windows 7 in half a year, I was hoping to use Offline Mode, but this limits it a bit more than just for the heavily DRMed games ?

Anyone did this successfully for Windows XP when Steam broke support for it ?