A 12TB Steam 'Teraleak' Spills More Than a Decade of Lost PC Gaming History

A massive 12TB archive of old Steam2 content has surfaced online, apparently containing nearly every version of games uploaded to Valve's servers between 2003 and 2013, including unreleased prototypes, playtest builds, and cut content. Early discoveries include deleted Portal 2 material, files tied to Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and beta builds of games like Left 4 Dead 2, CS: GO, Spore, and Dragon Age: Origins. Researchers claim much of the material was once accessible through an unsecured public API. Ars Technica reports: The reason this weekend's leaked content cuts off abruptly in 2013 is because that's when Valve updated its content distribution system from "Steam2" to the current SteamPipe system. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system removed various update approval bottlenecks on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials. Publicly accessible early versions of some games released before this SteamPipe transition had been considered lost content by archivists, no longer accessible from Valve itself and living on only as local downloads on aging machines. Apparently all that content wasn't as lost as many thought, though. Longtime Valve watcher and data miner Gabe Follower (previously) wrote on social media this weekend that he had "verified that everything in Steam2 Teraleak was obtained via a publicly accessible [API] endpoint. It's Valve's fault..." Spanish-language Valve streamer and analyst Scolcer also said on social media (via machine translation) that the teraleak was "obtained from a site that was 100% accessible to the public. It was there for everyone to download. No passwords. Nothing. Hidden in plain sight, but with no protection whatsoever." What's unclear right now if that API and publicly available Steam2 server content were accessed recently or if this weekend's leak represents content that was privately archived before the 2013 server transition and is just now being made public. "It could more-so be a collection of different people that knew about it and accumulated whatever people had downloaded back then into this massive archive," said The One Epicplayer, a moderator on the Valve Cut Content (VCC) Discord, which has long followed Valve betas and leaks. "I haven't been filled in on the full details but my suspicion is that these depot [files] were downloaded a long time ago and sat in a private collection," CrazyBubba, another VCC Discord moderator, told Ars. "There were a lot of leaks a few years back and many folks hoarded files for years. ... historically there have been issues with people lording content over other members." A readme file included with the leak offers "warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection" and encourages users to mirror and share it as widely as possible. On the VCC Discord, a user purporting to be the original uploader of the teraleak (who offered screenshots of a 22TB server upload log among their evidence) wrote that "getting this out really took a significant amount of effort from me and I would like it if it didn't go to waste."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.