So yesterday Steam starts slowing down a bit, temporarily freezing every once in a while. Today it starts being a total bitch and completely stops working. I decide to uninstall it and reinstall since that is what I see as the first reccomendation for every Steam related issue. Once reinstalled I go to my games list and no games are installed.
Uninstalling Steam gets rid of ALL my games too?!
I just checked my entire HD and theres no games, all my mods are gone, everything steam related is gone.
Is this normal? If so I will never uninstall Steam again.
I have crappy dsl internet and its going to take me AGES to get all my games reinstalled! :’( :’( :’( :’(
:facepalm: x100
Why would you uninstall if you don’t know what you’re doing? Of course all your games were deleted, next time you decide to do that, go to your steam dir and back-up the SteamApps folder!
Why would Steam and the games downloaded from it all be uninstalled at once without some sort of warning?
you dope.
Except all the other programs are built(or rebuilt) to only run inside the steam environment. They are all contained within the steam directory, which is automatically removed by the uninstaller.
edit: I was quoting your post before the edit.
If you want to complain, I suggest going on the steampowered forums or send Valve an email, there’s no point to this thread anymore.
Sorry you saw the post before the edit. I’m just a bit upset at the moment.
Thank you. Now I will know for future reference at least. 
No problem, a friend of mine somehow managed to install steam to his desktop(instead of C:\program files\steam), when he uninstalled it, every file on his desktop was deleted, including homework, family photos, etc… remember, things could always be worse!
It will take a while, but your games ARE associated to your account. Which means all you need to do is re-download them to your computer. Your custom stuff like modification games will need to be manually re-installed as well.
Again, it will take a while, but all is not completely lost.
At least you werent making any important revolutionary ground braking mods, right?
Sorry to hear about the lost games!
Tip: Next time you find out a bunch of files have been unintentionally wiped out, before you do anything else that could result in information being written to your hard drive (this includes browsing the web) immediately fire up a file recovery program like Recuva (made by the same people who make the awesome CCleaner, if that means anything) to see what files you can pull back from the grave. The catch is that it’s only capable of recovering files that haven’t yet been overwritten with new data. The longer you wait, the less likely it is that the data in question hasn’t been overwritten with something else, and thus the less likely it is that the data in question will be recoverable.
I’m assuming you’ve already started redownloading your games by now, so some of your old GCF files in your steamapps folder have probably already been overwritten… but if you’re not that far into the redownloading process yet, it might still be worth a shot to fire up Recuva and point it to C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps anyway, (or wherever else you had Steam installed,) just to see what you can pick up. Who knows, at the very least you might be able to shave off some download time by recovering a few GCFs that haven’t been overwritten yet. Worth a shot, IMO. 
Also, in general, what sersoft said: Always back up the SteamApps folder. If you ever need to move your Steam installation directory, or reinstall it, whatever, this method (also here… both examples basically just outline the process of backing-up/restoring the SteamApps folder) will ensure your games don’t get lost, so they don’t have to be redownloaded later.
Hope that helps somewhat… Good luck getting those game files back!
Thanks everybody.
Good thing I learned my lesson before I actually started making my first mod. All my test maps in Hammer were crap anyway. :3