It’s always good to back up your data in multiple places, and save data from video games is no exception.
Most gaming consoles and platforms offer cloud services nowadays. The days of your memory cards or console storage corrupting and losing hundreds of hours of save data are over!
Well, theoretically. The truth is that many of these console’s cloud saves are locked behind subscriptions, and even if not, you need to trust that the company doesn’t suddenly go under and you have no time to back up that save data.
You’ll still have the physical save files on your PC and consoles, but why stop at one backup? With multiple backups, you’ll keep your data safe and sound, regardless of which method ends up failing.
Cold Storage is Ideal
The best way to back up your saved data is to not factor in a cloud service at all and store it on a hard drive. You generally don’t need a solid-state drive for cold storage, and external hard drives are relatively cheap and offer a lot of storage.
I prefer Western Digital’s My Book line of hard drives. You can get up to 44TB of storage (though that will likely be overkill for most). With the amount of storage you get, you can back up more than just save data—you can back up games in their entirety!
WD My Book Duo RAID
$180 $200 Save
$20
This external hard drive can really do it all, except being portable. With two WD Red drives, you can back up all your data twice over to prevent loss, or use them separately for double the storage space.
Back It Up on Another Cloud Storage Service
What’s better than using one cloud service to back up your save data? Using two, especially if the second is a more general cloud storage service not attached to any particular application. I was already using IDrive to back up important files, and I already had a bunch of space left over, so why not add all of my gaming data to the backup?
Using a cloud storage service in this way can make it easier to gather save data even if it’s spread across different OSes. I can back up anything that ends up on my PC (from Steam and EGS titles to console saves I transferred in), then turn around and backup my Android and iPad save data in the same place.
Of course, the biggest advantage of a service like IDrive is being able to back up everything and have it easy to access, even across multiple devices. So this isn’t something to sign up for if your sole purpose is to back up your gaming data—though if you’re backing that up, why not back up everything else while you’re at it?
IDrive
A unique mix of cloud storage and data backup, with some of the best value premium plans available right now.
Finding the Save Data May Be Hard
With all of this in mind, depending on where you’re pulling the save data from, it can be difficult to find what you need to back it up. For example, with Steam, you’ll need to navigate to the ‘steamapps’, then the ‘common’ folder to find all the games you’ve had installed, then head into each game’s folder and pull the save files out from there—though it might be better just to copy and paste the whole folders so you know which save files go to which game.
Others, like the PS5, make it easy to back up your save data. For this Sony system, you can do this by going into the settings menu and selecting ‘System’, then ‘System Software’. There, you can both backup and restore the PS5 data you saved.
Unfortunately, there are a few systems where you can’t pull the save data out of the console itself at all, the most notorious of them being the Nintendo Switch. Short of modding the console to allow you to get the save data, you’ll have to hope Nintendo doesn’t lose the data somehow.
Back up Your Screenshots and Clips, Too
While you’re at it, don’t just back up your save data—back up your screenshots and video clips, too! You may not think about it now, but screenshots and clips are great memories of your time with the game, whether it’s a single player or multiplayer title. As my folder of 3,000+ screenshots I’ve taken over the years can attest to, the pictures you take can be even more sentimental and valuable to you than your actual save data. Just make sure you can find them!
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