[Suggestion] Separate dedicated server and single player save location.

[Astute]

I don't have a complete picture of how this happened, so I'm just going to relay what I know and offer a suggestion.


My friends and I just lost a 300 hour server save due to steam cloud sync. For some reason, the account that was logged in on the dedicated server suffered some kind of weird disconnect issue. The machine had to be restarted, and the account had to be relogged in. Upon logging in, steam cloud asked if it should restore. The saves were restored from the steam cloud under the assumption that it was just referring to recent saves from when it was restarted earlier that day.

However, these saves were not from when the server was restarted earlier that day, or last week, or even last month, but rather from when the last time Valheim had been launched (or I assume the last time a single player world was played in December of last year).

If a dedicated server is not going to sync to the cloud unless the client is launched, then perhaps it would be better to move the save files for the dedicated servers to another location that is not synced with the steam cloud, or having the server sync on a set interval with the steam cloud.

In its current form it (without knowledge that these saves are not being cloud saved) is basically just a time bomb for the server host waiting to go off.


On that note, the default server worlds that are created can be overwritten by other accounts signing in and syncing to the same folder(I don't know if this is true, but I'm noting it anyway).

Hindsight is 20/20, I know. The assumption that cloud saving, which is designed to protect from data loss, ended up causing the data loss. Once again, its time to return to hard backups.

I'm not mad at IronGate or Steam. It's soul crushing to lose that much progress, but what's done is done. I personally turned off steam sync a long time ago on my account due to losing progress on a Terraria world a decade ago in much the same way. Everything was fine for the last 4 months of play. Now, with the loss a ton of progress, everyone is calling it quits. It's really sad.

Anywho, thanks for reading.