Uploading to cloud taking forever

[Polarcrest]

As the title says...I have a pretty large factory at this point overall but nothing to crazy. Uploading to the cloud is taking nearly 20+ minutes at this point. Is this pretty normal for everyone?

[brian_va]

yep, i've got it off. not a bad idea to backup stuff if you do that.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Be glad it actually isn't timing out, Factorio saves can get too large for you to actually upload them before they time out.

[The Undead Watcher]

Yeah mine is taking a really long time too, though not 20 mins, more like 2-4.
And i need that to sync my saves between my Steam Deck and the Desktop since i can't seem to connect my Deck to the PC via a normal usb cable (or i don't know how to be more precise).

[Polarcrest]

I'm a bit worried. I've only really just started getting into that "megabase" territory and I'm seeing that at a certain point, I won't be able to upload to the cloud. I play on my laptop elsewhere quite often so that's a bit of an issue.

[Polarcrest]

maybe it's the 200,000 drones I have zipping around lol

[Chindraba]

There are two things which can make a game save big, other than the factory of course, which are often overlooked. The replay and the blueprints.
The replay is kind of obvious, once I took the time to think about it. Basically (though I've no idea the actual technique) it's saving every action taken by the user along with the map. The longer you play, even without making the map bigger or building new machines the replay is recording every move you make just to examine your production lines.
The blueprints are stored on disk in their own file. I was a bit surprised to learn that the same thing is saved in the game save file as well. Turned out that it came in handy when I messed up the library, so I'm not complaining. Still if the print library file is 60 MB that's another 60 MB in the save file too. I've started saving to files, using the export to string function, some of my massive prints to reduce the file size of saves.
Of course, if you have normal residential cable internet, what your neighbors are doing can slow you down sometimes as well. It might help find the problem to run a regular internet speed test (without using your ISP's version) when you notice the uploads are slow. Just do it when you're not also trying to upload.

[Polarcrest]

I'll take a look into the replay thing and see if that helps