5 Best Ways to Back Up Your Gaming Save Files

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A sense of frustration doesn’t come close to describing how you would feel when you discover that hours of gameplay you had on your hard drive have been lost or corrupted.

In the same way that you would rely on someone like Essential IT to ensure that your business systems and files don’t get lost or compromised, it makes sense to have some good protocols in place to make sure your gaming files aren’t lost.

You might be lucky enough to be playing a game that supports save-game syncing via the cloud, but the reality is that many games don’t support this option. With that in mind, here are some suggestions on the best ways to back up your gaming files.

Start with the obvious

The most obvious starting point when wanting to protect your gaming files would be to check whether the game you are playing supports cloud syncing.

Using this option when it’s available is a no-brainer. It takes care of the backup and restores process in the background and it will save you from having to worry about losing your progress.

Look for the cloud icon to see if this is an option that the game you are playing supports this facility.

Use a program to manage your backup process

You might want to take a look at an option like GameSave Manager, which is a free program so that you can automatically back up game saves.

This program consists of a list of games and their save locations. This makes it easy to back up and the good news is that the files can be restored on another computer.

Using a program helps simplify the backup process.

You can still use the cloud

Even if your game doesn’t support cloud syncing you can still put your saved games in a specific folder on the cloud.

If you have an account with the likes of Google Drive, or Dropbox, for example, you should be able to use a sync and link option to select the game you want to save.

If you prefer to handle backups on your own

Not everyone is comfortable with saving files in different locations. If that’s you, you can still save your files in a tried and tested old-school way.

The only problem you have to consider is that each game tends to have a different way to store their save files, so you will have to do a bit of homework. However, doing your backups the old-fashioned way is better than doing nothing.

Check your windows registry

Last but not least, it’s worth knowing that some game’s save data might be stored in the Windows registry.

Try a Google search for the specific game name that you want to save so that you can find the default location where the data is stored. It is also worth mentioning that is if you are playing a game that supports Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live, you will need to copy your GFWL profile folder, or you might find that your saves are not usable.

There is little doubt that any backup option that is automatic has to be better than backing up save games manually. The main thing to remember is that you should think about using some sort of backup protocol if you don’t want to experience the frustration of losing where you are in a game when something goes wrong.