I ran into an unexpected problem after upgrading my Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 14.04. The update took me 2 hours, everything was working fine, so I decided to reinstall Steam.

I installed Steam from the partners repository, Steam updates itself, asks me for password and then runs. But… Where are my games ? They are in the list but when I try to start it, Steam asks me to download the game. I don’t want to re-download 50Gio of data from Steam servers in order to reinstall my games.

A check with the command df -h shows me that the data is still on my hard drive, Steam has not deleted my data, it just looks at the wrong place.

Indeed, Steam previously stored games in .local/share/Steam/SteamApps/, but now it stores it in ~/.steam/SteamApps/

Just move it !

mv -i ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/* ~/.steam/SteamApps/

Restart Steam. Enjoy.