Steam Cloud

[Mechy]

I don't know if anyone can shed any light on this. I had to do a full format and reinstall. I just put Steam back on my D drive and tried to load NMS. I thought, that the sycning to the cloud would have my game saves but after 200 hours of playing the only thing it shows is 22 hours. Do I have to start over again? Or is there a way to get my saved game form the cloud? Thanks

[Faceplant]

Steam should have uploaded your save files when you played last, and that's what should have been downloaded when you re-installed. I'm not sure I've tested deleting the files and reloading from steam, but I have installed the game on another computer, and it pulled my latest save when I first ran the program on that computer. It also syncs properly when I switch between computers.

I don't know of any other way of restoring your saves if you didn't back them up on your end.

[goldengoose7]

NMS Save files are stored locally in your AppData folder, not on the Steam Cloud. In the case of No Man's Sky, the Steam Cloud service is primarily used for manually uploading screenshots from the game's Photo Mode into your PUBLIC section for sharing with other players, or linking within posts made on this forum.

You would have needed to have backed up your NMS folder to another location/drive before you reformatted your HDD to have a copy of your most recent save/progress. Routine backups of the entire NMS save file folder to another drive or external storage is highly recommended, since file corruption issues can occur on rare occasions without warning.

Local Path:

Users/YourWindowsUserName/AppData/Roaming/HelloGames/NMS

[Nettle]

Originally posted by goldengoose7:

NMS Save files are stored locally in your AppData folder, not on the Steam Cloud. In the case of No Man's Sky, the Steam Cloud service is primarily used for manually uploading screenshots from the game's Photo Mode into your PUBLIC section for sharing with other players, or linking within posts made on this forum.

If these things are screenshots then the programming team must have a professional wizard on staff to handle the compression. They're tiny!

https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorageapp/?appid=275850

[Mechy]

Thanks fellas for all the input. Guess I'm starting from scratch.

[goldengoose7]

Originally posted by Unarmed Bandit:

Originally posted by goldengoose7:

NMS Save files are stored locally in your AppData folder, not on the Steam Cloud. In the case of No Man's Sky, the Steam Cloud service is primarily used for manually uploading screenshots from the game's Photo Mode into your PUBLIC section for sharing with other players, or linking within posts made on this forum.

If these things are screenshots then the programming team must have a professional wizard on staff to handle the compression. They're tiny!

https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorageapp/?appid=275850

Have you noticed that there is no way to reverse the sort order to most recent? Mine always starts with my oldest points which for some reason start on May 22nd of 2017! I began this save in August of 2016 and I now have almost 2200 hours of progress saved within it. Obviously not the most reliable backup in the world. ;o)

But even more importantly... There is more to the save file data than just those point files. That is the problem. Not sure if a fresh install can duplicate potentially missing caches and other stuff contained in the now deleted NMS folder.

I personally would always rely on a local backup of the entire NMS folder. Mainly because when having an issue and HG Support wants to check out your game save, they always ask for a copy of your entire NMS folder be zipped up and dropped onto a Google Drive account or similar.

I figure there is a reason why they just don't ask for one of those tiny numbered files instead that you can practically email over to them as an attachment. ;o)

[goldengoose7]

Originally posted by Mechy:

Thanks fellas for all the input. Guess I'm starting from scratch.

At the same time you start your new game, create a folder on another drive called "NMS Save File Backups". Every time you finish a session, drag a copy of your original NMS folder over to that backup folder.

To make it even more precise in case you need to access one some day, create a new folder with the date of that session every day you play and put the NMS folder backup for that day's session in there.

That is what I have been doing for over 2 years. Has come in handy on more than a couple of occasions when testing the Exp Builds and getting my save file borked.

[Mechy]

Goldengoose7, all good suggestions, thank you. The funny thing was there was a save from Aug of 2017 that showed 22 hours.

[nanoplasm]

Err... your save game is in the Steam Cloud. I play NMS all over the world at different Net Cafe. The game always download the latest saved from the Cloud, and upload the latest saves when I am done.

[Nettle]

Originally posted by nanoplasm:

The game always download the latest saved from the Cloud, and upload the latest saves when I am done.

I can attest to the latter; all but two of the files in WinAppDataRoaming appear to have been mirrored exactly. Only things missing are the two INTRO_FEED_CACHE files which don't seem to have changed at all in the three months since I started playing.

Any idea what's in those .DDS things? They're not textures, that's for sure.

[Mechy]

Nanoplasm, that's what I thought. But when I re-installed Steam and then NMS, the only thing that showed up was that 22 hour save from last year. Very disappointing.

[goldengoose7]

Originally posted by Mechy:

Goldengoose7, all good suggestions, thank you. The funny thing was there was a save from Aug of 2017 that showed 22 hours.

No problem!

Did you use that as your starting point instead? I guess that would be better than complete scratch. ;o)

[Mechy]

No. I started from scratch. Wasn't sure if I had any deaths on that one. So, 22 hours is pretty close to starting over anyways. What gets me is last week I found my first S class exotic, so I was feeling pretty good.....haha

[Faceplant]

I would check to make sure it's saving online now, but I also recommend getting a backup program that does real-time incremental backups.

Backing up by hand is a good suggestion, but a good backup program will do it automatically and allow you to restore any version within a defined time span. It can help if one of your saves gets corrupted and you don't realize it right away.

Of course, a good backup program also will help protect any other important files on your system, and they're even actively trying to combat ransomware now.