There is no shortage of IL2 1946 disks on Ebay for sale very cheaply. It would be worth it to get one and download the official patches for it so you can have a clean official and base version of the flight sim to start with.
Steam was always a disaster for IL2 and there is simply no guarantee that any source of a patched up version of the sim is going to be correct or legitimate.
Once you have a clean version all patched up you can simply backup the whole thing in a few different places on various media so that you will not lose it again. I have copies on optical disks, hard drives and thumb drives in addition to having all the old discs and patches saved and backed up.
Go ahead and play with hacks and mods, and when that makes the install buggy you can simply delete the entire mess and start new again by copying from your backup. In it's official version IL2 is very stable and reliable, I and my friends have old computers and hard-drives laying around that are ten years old that have good working old copies of it. When you go with Steam or some hack/mod all bets are off......
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