Have you ever wished one of your favorite good old games had a way to automatically backup and synchronize your saved game data (and other game settings) across multiple machines, or after a reformat? Do you have a NAS server (or a USB stick you don't mind toting between the computers you play on)? If you answered "yes" to both questions, read on!

I'm working on a free-to-use and open source tool to automatically manage user data. I designed it to be capable of working with any application, but so far it's been used almost exclusively for games. It already supports nearly 100 applications (many of them from GOG), and it's reached a stage of completeness where I think it would greatly benefit from feedback (and contributions) from users besides me, and contributions from others who want to add support for their favorite game (which is super easy to do via simple XML files, with a little learning).

It's best used with a NAS (network attached storage) over a wired network connection - so if you play games on two or more computers that both have a wired LAN connection to the same NAS server, that's perfect. If you have a wireless connection to the NAS, this may also work, depending on how reliable your wireless connection is when copying large amounts of data (and if it's not, consider the USB stick option). Yes, I plan to expand to have more options such as syncing over a real cloud in the future.

If you're on Windows Vista or higher, it should only be used for games you install OUTSIDE of the "program files" folder or other folders that require elevated privileges to write to (because of permission issues).

Note: I'm still working on this software, and it has not yet been tested by a large number of people. I have personally used this project to sync my game save data for many months, and have never seen it lose anything during that time - however, if you're using this software on any game saves or other data you'd really hate to lose, please back up that data first because this project is still maturing!

If you're interested, check if you are currently playing any of the supported applications here: http://www.michaelgcarlson.com/settings/supported-applications/

And see the tutorial here: http://www.michaelgcarlson.com/settings/tutorial/

Clickable link

Thanks, MikeGC. I'm definitely going to try this out, even though I don't have a NAS.

Thanks for the link, Barefoot_Monkey!

This looks really interesting, thanks for sharing and doing it :)

This is not a bad idea. Especially for certain games that love to corrupt files.

This looks like a fantastic tool. Thanks for putting this together and sharing! I really only play my games on one PC, but I would be happy to test syncing game saves with my wife's computer, if you need help testing.

I don't have a NAS, but our wireless connection seems to handle transfers of large files just fine. I haven't looked at XML since tinkering with my original Xbox years go, but it was easy enough to pick up...

If I can help in some way, feel free to PM me... I'm flighty and have next to no memory, but what I do have is insane amounts of free time. :)

For those of you without a NAS or USB stick:

I used to be a very on-the-go gamer and I needed to save my The Witcher saves b/c I was using multiple computers to play it.

This thread gave me a lot of help:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/using_dropbox_to_sync_gog_game_saves


Useful links from that thread:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/24244/sync-any-folder-to-dropbox-with-synctoy/
http://www.gamesave-manager.com

Why would you need a tool for that? can't you just place your save files/folders into your dropbox and put a symlink where the files/folders used to be?

That's what GOG do in their Wine-based Mac ports; the game wants those files/folders in its directory, but OS X standards say such things belong into the user Library, so symlinks trick the game into thinking the save files/folders are where it would expect them to be.

Tallima & HiPhish: those are great points, and both dropbox/symlinks solution and game save manager are definitely related to my project.

Regarding Dropbox:
1) With dropbox, you must figure out where each game stores its data on your own, and setup the symlinks yourself on each computer you want to sync to. It's easy to make mistakes, too - for example, you remembered to symlink the HOMM2 save directory, but did you also symlink the high score file? If you play a lot of different games or switch games often as I do, it would require quite a bit of work to setup all the symlinks. With my solution and UDM files, you just download them on one computer & go. With community contributions, we can create UDMs for a large number of games.
2) Dropbox can't support games like Caesar 3, which store their saves in the same directory as the game data files (unless you go back in and create a new symlink each time you create a new save game, which is pretty annoying, or you sync your entire game install, which is the sort of thing that can quickly push you over the free storage limit if you have more than a few games like this).
3) There are some config files which should only be partially synced across machines, and dropbox can't handle that. For example, some games that store unlockables into a config script or INI file, and in that same file they also store graphics quality settings and screen resolution. Using dropbox for this would force you to use the same resolution and graphic quality settings on both your laptop and desktop, which would be annoying, and a few games will even fail to start if they're set to an unsupported resolution on a laptop with a small screen.
4) Dropbox doesn't support syncing registry, which some games require to really sync everything you want.
5) Dropbox becomes a pay service when you exceed a certain storage size, and if their pricing structure changes in the future and you don't want to pay, you may find yourself wanting another boat to jump to. My project is that boat :)
6) By using this, providing feedback, filing bugs, contributing UDMs for new games, you're supporting an open source solution that *everyone* will be able to use for a better future. Join us and help improve the world for your favorite games :)

Regarding Game Save Manager, this is a little closer to my project in intent (a solution specific to managing game settings), but I believe this mostly does backups and resoration, which is a manual process and in my experience pretty slow, or it can automatically create symlinks for you, which eliminates drawback #1 from above, but does have drawbacks #2, #3, #4 from above. Also again it's not open source, so the owners can in the future do whatever they want with it, including charge money for it, even charge money for supporting games that they only support because *you* contributed that support to it (at least, I think so - someone correct me if I'm wrong and I'll edit the post). I can't do that with my project because of the terms of the license of the WiX project that my project is a part of, and that's a good thing for everyone who uses it. I must say game save manager DOES have a very impressive library of games it can support, however I hope to form a small community of folks who contribute to the project, to catch up to this.

There's a reason Valve added Cloud support to their Steam service - because it makes settings and save games on Steam mostly "just work" for certain games. Likewise there's a reason Gamesave manager added automatic symlink creation support. I'm seeking to replicate that experience, but support even more games by giving appropriate granularity of settings, all via open-source code that doesn't tie you to any company or organization's specific service (it can be used with Steam games or GOG games, or games you install by CD, etc).

Thanks for the extra clarification.

It does sound like an awesome project.

Just the other day, I redownloaded Dragon Age. I had lost everything in a hard drive failure. I figured my 50-hours in DA was gone, so I just left it alone for a few years to give me some distance.

I had no idea EA was saving my games in the cloud. When I redownloaded everything, everything was still right there. My jaw dropped.

The ability to do the same with my GOGs would be spectacular if it was automated and easy.

I don't have a NAS, and I find thumb-drives terribly unreliable. But I'm sure once your project nears completion, even I'll be able to get some use out of it.

Thanks for all your hard work on it!

You are right, there are many games that either don't follow best practises or were made before those best practises existed. I know that Planescape Torment won't launch if there is no settings file, so if I move and symlink the settings fine, then move the game to another computer it won't work. M solution was to make a script which will first check if there is a backup of the settings file, and if there is none it will make one and store it in the game folder. If the game is launched and there is no target for the symlink the script will copy the backup file to the user Library and provide a proper target for the symlink. I described the whole process here:
http://portingteam.com/tutorials/article/41-linking-save-files-to-the-user-library/

Of course this just covers one instance and doesn't solve any other possible problems, like sharing settings that might be incompatible for different machines, you are correct. I just didn't think of that issue because I only have one computer.

Yes, corruption (either due to game bugs or hardware issues) is one of the reasons I think backing up is important - and really, who is going to bother to do it every day?

I intentionally made it automatically back up your data each time it changes, storing a (compressed) backup copy both locally in your user profile, and on the remote database you create to sync to. I'd love to have help, and have sent you a PM. I think the only way this project will be successful is with community contributions.

Anyone feel free to PM me about the project - whether you're interested in helping out, or you have a question about it, or just have any kind of feedback, which is most definitely welcome.

That is a great experience, and that's exactly the sort of experience I'd like to recreate for every game, even games where the developer did offer a game-specific cloud service, but no longer does due to the game being too old, or the company going out of business.

I want a world where this isn't considered special anymore - it's just expected.