How do i know if a steam game is actually cloud saved?

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xCam39x Oct 30, 2020 @ 11:15am

I've been wanting to clear out my appdata folder recently, but I don't know if it is safe to without losing my saves. When I deleted the Phasmophobia (A game that says it supports cloud saves) appdata folder, it erased all my progress. I don't want that to happen again with another game, such as payday 2. It says it supports cloud saved but when I look in the settings of it, it says that it has 0 bytes saved to cloud. (https://imgur.com/a/DK6G2Da) So how do i actually make a game save to the cloud?

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Showing 1-10 of 10 comments

Brujeira Oct 30, 2020 @ 11:26am

Well that depends on the game. The thing is that the store pages don’t say that the games support cloud saves - they only say that they use the cloud for something.

99 times out of 100 that something will include cloud saves... but you can’t rely on that. The only ways to know for sure if the game saves to the cloud are to ask in the game’s own forum or check your cloud storage manually after you exit the game.

Brujeira Oct 30, 2020 @ 11:52am

Might be wise to take a manual backup of your saves before you go any further. Try this handy utility for that.

https://www.gamesave-manager.com/

nullable Oct 30, 2020 @ 12:36pm

I'm old school, I have local saves, if I want to preserve them I back them up myself. I use game-save-manager and an weekly process to throw an archive into my dropbox. Boom cloud saves.

crunchyfrog Oct 30, 2020 @ 2:34pm

This will show you all your games which have cloud saves (in a browser of your choice):
https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage

And I absolutely echo others' comments here. If you have more than just a handful of games on STeam you MUST use gamesavemanager.

It's been something I've recommended for years. It simply looks at all your games, collates all of them together and you click which you want to back up and it does the work finding them for you. Bang done.

Personally, I'm over zealous when it comes to backups because I have thousands of games on various platforms, it means I can play a game then not go back to it for years. So proper backups are essential.

So if you're THAT interested too here's my approach.

At the end of every week (or earlier if I've been heavily playing) I use gamesavemanager to get the saves for the games I've been playing backed up to either a USB pendrive or a card. I also dump it on a larger USB drive which I use as the main backup for ALL my platforms, from PS1 and PS2 onwards mostly.

After a few months I then take anything that's changed on that "master" drive and copy that over to another drive or onto a DVD-RW.

So I create a son/father/grandfather setup in the same way as I used to when I worked as a computer operator.

It means that chances are, I'll never lose much progress again.

Jasung Oct 30, 2020 @ 4:16pm

On that note, do game saves ever expire in the cloud? They don't, right? Ideally, I can return to a game years later regardless of machine and pick up where I left off without issue, correct? Thanks in advance. :]

Brujeira Oct 30, 2020 @ 4:40pm

Originally posted by Jasung:
On that note, do game saves ever expire in the cloud? They don't, right? Ideally, I can return to a game years later regardless of machine and pick up where I left off without issue, correct? Thanks in advance. :]

That storage and everything in it is permanently allocated to your account. it's there until the day you ask Valve to delete your account if you ever decide to quit Steam completely. If you start running out of cloud space then that may be a different matter but I've never heard of anyone even getting close to filling their storage.

crunchyfrog Oct 30, 2020 @ 4:52pm

Originally posted by Jasung:
On that note, do game saves ever expire in the cloud? They don't, right? Ideally, I can return to a game years later regardless of machine and pick up where I left off without issue, correct? Thanks in advance. :]

Yup, absolutely you can.

I have had this Steam account over 9 years. About 5 years ago I retired anddecided to (for various reasons) not bother getting another PC and so walked away for a bit. When I returned in February, alll the saves were there and I simply carried on ... after remembering what the hell I was doing, of course.

As for the filling up of the allocated storage, nah. I wouldn't worry. I've got currently about 1100 games and that isn't even anything much. I have a few friends that have many thousands (one I know who has over 12,000 and they have no problems) so I seriously doubt you'd ever reach that sort of issue.

Last edited by crunchyfrog; Oct 30, 2020 @ 4:54pm