I fallen in love with using cloud storage for my savegames.
Most Steam games does it, the newer Origin games does it but would it not be nice to have all your savegames synced to the cloud so you could access that savegame on all your computers?
If the answer to that question was YES! then this guide is for you.
First you got to have a PC running either Windows Vista or Windows 7, XP wont cut it.
If you got that then follow the steps below.
Step 1:
You need a DropBox account or a account to a similar service.
By default Dropbox gives you 2GB of free cloud storage, and then you get an additional 250MB for following their
getting started tour .
Then you can get an additional 250MB for each user you invite to the service.
But dont sweat the invited user also gets a piece of the action, so +250MB to them.
There is a limit however, as the maximum extra storage is capped to 8GB but 2GB is more than enough.
So if you follow my referal link, and complete the Dropbox tour after you have registered then you get 2,5GB of free storage.
Referal link for extra 250MB.
Step 2:
Now that you registered that account we need to download the Dropbox client for Windows.
It should already been downloaded if you followed the tour but i will add the link just in case.
Download link.
You can also add your smartphone running Android,iOS or BlackBerry and also other operative systems like Mac or Linux to the service so you can sync files between them with ease.
Step 3:
Now you got to decide what savegame folders you want to sync to Dropbox.
Il start with the "My Games" folder under "C:\Users\DEagleson\Documents".
Just replace my username DEagleson with whatever your Windows Username is.
Now we need to use CMD or the console.
Just click the Windows key, and enter "CMD" into the search field.
( You can also locate it by clicking Windows key, then Programs > Accessories > CMD.)
Then once Windows shows you the CMD program, right click on it and select "Run as Administrator".
This is very important because we cannot make the symbolic link unless we get the permission needed by Windows Vista or Windows 7.
Step 4:
Now we will make the symbolic link.
First move your "My Games" folder away from your documents folder.
This is important because you cannot make the link if there is a folder there before you start.
I just move it to the desktop area.
Then we have to discover where the DropBox folder is located.
By default mine is located in the root of my Windows Username folder.
"C:\Users\DEagleson\Dropbox\"
As stated before just rename my username with your Windows username.
Now we combine the information we got in step 3 with the DropBox info in this step with the command needed to make the symbolic link.
The end result will be this.
Code:
mklink /D "C:\Users\DEagleson\Documents\My Games" "C:\Users\DEagleson\Dropbox\My Games"
Copy Paste this into the CMD window and then press enter.
If you do not get a error message when doing this the hurray you did it.
Step 5:
Finally we need to move the savegames into our DropBox folder.
Now go to your DropBox folder and move "My Games" into it.
The final result will be "C:\Users\DEagleson\Dropbox\My Games".
To confirm this is working properly go to your documents folder where My Games used to be and click on it.
Click on it and while it seems that the folder placement is the same we are now actually in our DropBox folder.
The DropBox applet down in the corner where Steam and Origin usually reside will now tell you that its syncing the savegames to your personal cloud storage.
Congratulations, you now got a cloud backup and syncing of your savegames.
Personally i started doing this because Skyrim, while being a Steamworks game does not do Cloud Saving.
With DropBox it now does that.
Being offline is not a problem either because DropBox will just sync your local copy to the cloud as soon as you got a working internet connection again.
Hope you found this guide helpful and as always stay nice and play hard. :3
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
