How to Back Up PC Game Saves Before Something Breaks

A reader wrote to me last spring after his boot drive died without warning. He had a recent Windows image, his documents synced to OneDrive, and he still lost about 340 hours of a modded Skyrim playthrough, because the saves sat in a folder nobody thinks to look at and no sync tool had ever been pointed at it. He had been doing backups for years. He had just never backed up the one thing he actually cared about.

Game saves are the cheapest data on a PC to protect and the most irritating to lose. A 70 GB install redownloads itself overnight while you sleep. A 40 MB save folder holding your character, your base layout, your unlocks and your rebound keys cannot be redownloaded at all. So here is the routine I use on my own machine, roughly twenty minutes to set up once, plus the parts of the standard advice I think are wrong.

Where PC game saves actually live

There is no single folder. Four locations cover maybe ninety percent of what you own, and knowing which one a game uses tells you whether it is already protected or completely exposed.

Documents and My Games. Open %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games and you will usually find a dozen folders you forgot about. Bethesda titles, Rockstar titles, most Unity games and a lot of indie releases drop saves here. This is the good case, because if you sync your Documents folder to any cloud drive, these come along for free.

AppData, the hidden one. Paste %LOCALAPPDATA% and %APPDATA% into the address bar of File Explorer. Hollow Knight, Terraria, Factorio and a long tail of others keep saves in here. Nothing syncs this by default. On the machines I have looked at, this is where the data at real risk lives.

The Steam userdata folder. Under Steam\userdata\<your account id> sits one numbered folder per game that uses Steam Cloud. Those numbers are app ids, which makes the folder unreadable at a glance, but it is a useful single target: copy the whole userdata tree and you have grabbed every Steam Cloud game at once.

Inside the install folder. The worst case. Some older games, and a surprising number of Japanese releases, write saves into their own program folder. Verify files or reinstall the game and those saves can go with it. If a game does this, it needs manual attention before any drive maintenance.

The fast way to find a specific game: search its name in %USERPROFILE% and in %LOCALAPPDATA%, sort results by date modified, and play for five minutes first so the save file timestamp jumps to the top.

A routine that takes twenty minutes to set up

I do not run backup software with a dashboard and a subscription for this. A scheduled copy is enough, because saves are tiny and the only thing that matters is that the copy happens without me remembering.

Make one folder to rule them. I use D:\Saves on a second drive. Inside, one subfolder per game, named plainly: Factorio, not fct_bk_2.
Write a two line batch file. One robocopy line per source, with /MIR /R:1 /W:1. Example: robocopy "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Team Cherry\Hollow Knight" "D:\Saves\HollowKnight" /MIR /R:1 /W:1. Adding a new game later is one more line.
Schedule it for logoff, not for a fixed hour. Task Scheduler, trigger on workstation lock. A fixed 3 a.m. job misses the point, since the risky moment is right after a long session, not overnight.
Send that folder somewhere off the machine. Any free cloud tier handles it. My whole save archive across 60 games is 2.1 GB, and most of that is one Cities Skylines city.
Keep dated snapshots for the games you care about. Before a big mod change or a new patch, copy the folder once by hand and stamp it: Skyrim-2026-11-02. Thirty seconds of work that has saved me twice.

Step five is the one people skip and later wish they had not. A mirrored backup faithfully mirrors a broken save over your good one. Versions are what protect you from corruption; mirrors only protect you from dead hardware.

The advice I would skip: cloud saves have it covered

You will read that Steam Cloud, the Epic equivalent and Xbox sync make all of this unnecessary. I used to believe that too. Three things changed my mind.

First, coverage is partial and invisible. A game's store page lists Cloud Saves as a feature, but it may only sync settings, or only the main campaign and not your mod profile. There is no warning when a save type falls outside what the game uploads. I have found at least four titles in my own library where the configuration synced and the progress did not.

Second, cloud sync has no undo. It is one slot, overwritten every session. If a mod update mangles your save on Tuesday, Tuesday's mangled file is what sits in the cloud by Tuesday evening. Steam does keep a small amount of history you can reach through a browser, but it is limited and not something to count on at the moment you need it.

Third, conflicts resolve the wrong way more often than you would expect. Play offline on a laptop, let the desktop sync first, and a dialog asks you to pick between two versions described only by timestamp. Under pressure, people pick wrong. I picked wrong once and lost an afternoon of Valheim building.

Cloud saves are a genuinely good convenience layer for moving between machines. They are not a backup, because a backup you cannot roll back is just a second copy of your most recent mistake.

Checking that the backup is real

An untested backup is a guess. Twice a year I do the same five minute check: pick one game, rename its live save folder to Name-old, copy the backup into place, and launch the game. If my progress loads, the routine works. If the game creates a fresh save instead, I have learned something cheap rather than expensive.

Two failures turn up repeatedly in that test. Some games store an account id or a machine identifier inside the save and will not read a folder restored under a different Windows user, which is why I keep the user name identical when I rebuild a PC. And some launchers overwrite local files with the cloud copy on first start, so for those you restore the files, start the game offline, verify the save, and only then reconnect.

If you are short on space on the drive holding all this, sorting that out is easier than it sounds. Our guide to freeing up storage without deleting games covers the parts worth clearing first. Backups belong in the same monthly slot as the rest of your upkeep, next to a sensible PC cleaning routine.

When a save is already damaged

Before you accept the loss, look for the game's own spare copies. Many write a rotating set: files ending in .bak.old, or numbered quicksaves and autosaves a few minutes behind your manual one. Copy the whole folder somewhere safe first, then try renaming the backup file to the name the game expects.

Windows File History and restore points occasionally hold an older copy as well. Right click the save folder, choose Properties, then Previous Versions. It is empty on most systems, since the feature is off by default, but it costs ten seconds to check and I have recovered one save that way.

If the file is genuinely corrupt and there is no spare, stop digging. Save editors and hex repair work for a few specific games with documented formats and waste an evening for everything else. Rebuilding twelve hours of progress is usually faster than rescuing it, and far less frustrating.

Frequently asked questions

How large are PC game saves?

Most sit between 1 MB and 50 MB. City builders and colony sims are the exceptions: a mature Cities Skylines or Rimworld save can pass 200 MB, and Minecraft worlds grow without limit as you explore. My entire archive for 60 games is about 2 GB, so storage cost is not a reason to skip this.

Can I move game saves to a different PC?

Often yes, if you copy the folder to the same relative path and keep the same Windows user name. Games that tie saves to a hardware id or an account token are the ones that refuse, and you find out by testing rather than by reading. Copy, do not move, so the original stays intact.

Does reinstalling Windows delete game saves?

A clean install wipes the drive it lands on, including Documents and AppData, so yes unless you copied them off first. Saves kept on a separate data drive survive. This is the single most common way people lose progress, and it is entirely avoidable with one copy made the night before.

Should I back up mod files too?

Yes, and specifically your mod list with version numbers. A save from a modded game will not load correctly without the same mods at the same versions. Export the load order from your mod manager and keep that text file beside the save; it weighs nothing and turns an unloadable save into a recoverable one.