Hi guys, Just had a brain wave and need you guys to vet the idea: Dropbox can act as a drive on your harddrive when it's actually on the cloud. Can you set your steam save files to be located there so you can play on another PC? Maybe, have it so that the local file on the 2 pc's are auto-copied and auto retrieved whenever they are changed? What's your thoughts?
Doesn't steam save games over cloud anyway?! Even if not you would need a pretty massive dropbox to do it as afaik there is no method of separating gamefiles and save games from their respective directories. You would almost certainly need to pay for it.
How big are save files? I don't think all games have steam save files. Xcom for example has different save files for me different pcs
\Steam\userdata is where most of the saves are stored. Your method can be achieved by using a NTFS symlink to a dropbox folder, but rather than fiddle with that I have a task scheduler job which copies my userdata folder to a backup location daily. I don't trust the Steam cloud much, they lose stuff sometimes >.<
The number of times steam cloud says it can't save stuff etc means I wouldn't trust it if I wanted my saves in multiple places. Dropbox seems like a good idea
Yeah that would work, it doesn't bother me since I only have the one pc. Steam cloud annoys me since it asks me what to do when it fails to update the cloud when playing something like tf2, where I think it is meant to be able to store configs etc, which could be useful. If I wanted to start backing stuff like that up, would you recommend drive over dropbox?
dropbox are for noobs. use SVN, and commit the saves you are happy to the server. you can also branch your gameplay by creating SVN branches. before you go into a memorable mission, you tag that save point. also setup Trac to manage your gameplay progress, and perhaps even delegate tasks to your little brother.
Steam cloud keeps all your saves ive used my account on 2 pcs and transfered the saves no problem at all.
I noticed in Civ 5 the steam cloud option, its a little annoying tbh having to pick to save there everytime. Mind you i dont really have a use for cloud savegames.
I've done it with this Link Shell Extension. Works perfectly. Install link shell extension and dropbox client. Move the folder with your saves to your drop box folder then right click and hold on the moved folder and drag back to the original location. you'll have a new option in your context menu which will be "drop as". Select drop as and choose junction. This will create a ntfs junction the same way steam mover does. I'm using this for steam and origin games and so far it's been great.
Sounds good! So does this auto update the save files on both PC's o do you have to manually update it?
You'd do that in the dropbox client. I created a folder on dropbox called Game Saves. I then set the dropbox client to sync that folder. I'm only using this on one PC at the moment so you'd have to configure the client on both PC's to do this.
I think it depends on the game if it syncs, im certain none of my valve games (portal, HL2 etc etc) goto the cloud.