Where is game save data stored on PC? How do I back up my game saves? To avoid gaming data losing, you had better make a backup for game saves. In this post, MiniTool will show you a guide on how to find saved game files on PC and how to backup game saves.
Why Backup Game Saves on PC
If you are a game player, you may ever be very distraught when losing game saves accidentally. Due to computer viruses, hard drive malfunction, game updates, system updates, power outage/corruption, or other causes, your game saves on the PC could be gone suddenly.
When the accident happens, you may have played games for several hours. After restarting the game and re-loading your save, the save data may be damaged and the progress is reset to zero. How devastating it feels! If you have a habit of backing up your game saves, things could be easy – you can directly restore the losing save data and won’t play the game from scratch.
Besides, if you want to transfer games to another platform, you can use the backup to restore game files. When you need to replace a new PC or reinstall Windows, you can backup your game data and restore it, without losing hours of gameplay.
How to Backup Game Saves on PC
Currently, many games support save-game syncing via the cloud. If you are playing games on Steam, you can click the List View icon at the upper right corner and see if there is a cloud icon next to the game. Games without the cloud icon don’t support syncing saves to the cloud automatically. The game data may be stored on the PC. Besides, some famous single-player games keep their data locally.
In the following part, let’s see how to backup PC game saves.
Backup Game Saves Manually (Copy & Paste)
This is a very easy way for game saves backup. To do this task, you need to know the game save files location. So, how to find saved game files on PC?
Based on different games, the locations of save files are different. There are some common ones for you as a reference:
- C:\Users\NAME\Saved Games\GAME
- C:\Users\NAME\Documents\My Games\GAME
- C:\Users\NAME\Documents\GAME
- C:\Users\NAME\AppData\Local\GAME
- C:\Users\NAME\AppData\Roaming\GAME
- C:\ProgramData\GAME
- C:\Program Files\GAME
- C:\Program Files\Steam\USER\GAME
- C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\GAME
Just find your game saves, copy and paste them to another safe location.
Backup PC Game Saves with MiniTool ShadowMaker
To backup game saves on your computer, you can choose to use a professional file backup software and here we recommend using MiniTool ShadowMaker. This tool can help you easily create a backup for your important data. It supports automatically backing up files and folders.
Since your game progress keeps updated, you had better back up game data regularly. Here, you can run MiniTool ShadowMaker for this work via its Schedule feature.
Step 1: Get the installer of MiniTool ShadowMaker and install this tool on your PC.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Step 2: Open this backup software and click Keep Trial to continue.
Step 3: Click Backup, go to SOURCE > Folders and Files, and go to the game folder (as mentioned in way 1) to find the game save and choose it.
Step 3: Click DESTINATION and choose a path to save the backup.
To automatically your game data, you can click Options > Schedule Settings, enable this feature, and configure a time point for the scheduled plan. Then, start the last step.
Step 4: Click Back Up Now to execute the backup task. Next, your game save could be backed up at the scheduled time and you won’t manually create a backup for it repeatedly.
Run a Professional Game Backup Software – GameSave Manager
In addition, you can run a professional game backup software for PC game saves backup. Here, GameSave Manager is mentioned by many users and you can also have a try. This utility is free to use and it can enable you to easily backup, restore, and transfer game saves.
You can run it to scan the entire disk to find multiple game saves and you don’t need to manually track through all of the different directories for game saves backup. It supports schedule backup without worrying about losing game progress. Just get it to have a try via https://www.gamesave-manager.com/.
Verdict
After reading this post, you know how to find saved game files on PC and how to backup game saves on PC. Just follow one way to keep your game data safe.
In addition, you may wonder about how to backup game saves on Steam. Here is a related post for you – Steam Backup Game Files via Steam Backup/Manually/Magic Tool.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Vera is an editor of the MiniTool Team since 2016 who has more than 7 years’ writing experiences in the field of technical articles. Her articles mainly focus on disk & partition management, PC data recovery, video conversion, as well as PC backup & restore, helping users to solve some errors and issues when using their computers. In her spare times, she likes shopping, playing games and reading some articles.