When the cloud rains or when good game saves go bad

There's been a whole lot of talk about how great the cloud is.  Now you can have all of the services that once required a roomful of servers at your office with nothing more than a fast Internet connection.

It's great isn't it?  I mean all you have to do is log on to your little PC, Smartphone or whatever and there's all your crap just waiting.  No begging the IT guys to get your deleted emails back, no suffering through "maintenance windows" and no more going to the office just to open a file.

Everything is in the "cloud" and it always works all of the time...[sic]

Except when it doesn't.  I'm in IT and I've seen the thunderstorm the cloud can cause.  Thing is, you can't get away from it.  Even if you're a gamer.

Take the popular game portal Steam.  Steam has never been easy to nail down when it comes to finding saved games, hardware setup files or even screenshots taken from within the client.  The assumption is that everything should flow from the client and nobody should go poking around the file system for anything. 

Except we have to.  Why? 

Because of the "Cloud"

Steam began migrating its entire game library to something called the Steam Cloud a little over a year ago and the results have been mixed.  While it's very convenient to always have the most recent updates to your game library close at hand no matter whose machine you're logging into the fact of the matter is it doesn't always work.  When it doesn't the results can be devastating.

Considering how far games have advanced from just a bunch of belligerent pixels to epic experiences rivaling a Hollywood Blockbuster it's no wonder that people get upset when things go awry.

In my own experience I've found that the average Triple-A title can occupy 150 to 200 hours before I'm done with it.  That's over a week of my life down the drain if my progress doesn't get saved.

And that's what's happening...

One of the more popular titles on the Steam service is a game called Grid 2.  Being a new title it was written from the outset to use the Steam Cloud.  That means nothing gets stored locally, even single player games.  That also means that if anything goes wrong with the files in the cloud or corruption occurs those files are useless. 

Steam treats cloud services as ubiquitous and infallible.  That means you could upload corrupt files and the Steam servers will happily replicate them to every other PC, console or connected device configured to use the service with your selected title.

There are ways of finding cached copies of game files but actually locating them is an exercise in finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.  Why?  Because Steam (Valve) doesn't think you need to know where they are.

But we obviously do...

There's a tired old adage that goes, "Never put all your eggs in one basket"  and if we're honest, a cloud doesn't make much of a basket to start with.

This is a gaming blog so I'm not going to offer you tips on retrieving you lost contacts from Office365  but I can give you some help in locating local copies of your saved games.  Here's a tip, find these files before something bad happens and save them somewhere else.  It's common sense but we gamers frequently ignore anything that doesn't involve playing our games.

First off, even if you don't use Steam there's a standard location in Windows based PC's to look for saved game files and sometimes Steam will actually put stuff in there too.  Actually, it's where it should be stuffing this crap but Steam has to be "different."

Look in the following directory, you may have to turn on hidden files in the folder views to see it.

C:\Users\*logon-name*\Documents\My Games   NOTE:  *logon-name* is the username you log onto windows with. 

In XP and older Windows PC's it will be more like C:\Documents and Settings\*logon-name*\My Documents\*gamename*\saves (or savegame or backup or whatever)

I can almost guarantee the chances of finding anything useful in those folders these days is just about zero, however.

If you're an avid Steam user things get more complicated but the path to glory starts at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\*********   NOTE: replace the asterisks with the 8 digit number you find in your path.  That number corresponds to your Steam User ID.  

Under that folder are a bunch of subfolders with numbers.  Each number corresponds to a game you've installed.  It's within these folders that you'll locate the local copies of Steam saved games, settings, etc.

They may be in subfolders with names like backup, Remote, local and the like.  Check Steam forums if you get lost, someone is bound to know the exact location of the files you're going to need. 

Once you find your files copy them somewhere safe and don't forget to regularly update them.  That is unless you're ok with a 6 month old saved file. 

As big an evil as EA has become in the past decade. ( I still hate them for securom) they tend to keep local copies of saved data in the standard: C:\Users\*logon-name*\Documents\My Games.  Of course they've already started copying Steam features like local copies of game installation files so they'll probably get weird too.

If you're on a Mac and a gamer, well, god bless you for your tenacity...

That said, most saved game and settings locations start out in  /Library/Application Support

Mac's tend to like to group everything together in their folder structure so if you don't find what you need in a subdirectory of the path above there are hundreds of forums that can point you in the right direction.  Some games may even let you manage your saved games from within their own interface.  Just remember that what you see in a Mac folder is really an abstraction of how things are really organized under the fluffy packaging.  It is based on Unix after all.

As for Linux, anything goes.  That may require a visit to the game's forum to find the exact location.  Steam tries to mimic the windows client folder structure, however, within the user's home folder like this:

home/*username*/.Local/Share/Steam/SteamApps/common/*gamename#/save (or whatever)

 I'll close with a couple of videos I did dealing with this exact problem of hidden saved games. 

And remember, clouds are for rain not holding eggs!