Where does The Phantom Pain store its save-game data on PC?

I would like to create a backup of my save game data. I know the game has no manual save system (ugh), and it also has several save-game-breaking bugs that I'm aware of. With only the one save game slot, encountering one of those bugs could mean losing dozens of hours of game progress. I imagine the game must be storing the save-game data in some specific location or file, something I can make a copy of periodically so that if my save file does become corrupted, I don't lose too much. Where is it, if it exists?


The Phantom Pain stores its data on two locations, the first one contains exclusively The Phantom Pain data, and the latter is shared with Ground Zeroes. (For purposes such as importing the save data to Ground Zeroes) Where the UserID matches the one of the Steam Account that has the save data.

  • The Phantom Pain save data can be found under Steam's directory Steam\userdata\UserID\287700
  • Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain data can be found under Steam\userdata\UserID\311340

You can also check the folders using the Previous Versions on Windows, by doing Right click -> select properties -> Previous Versions tab and you can see a number of backups made by the OS that you can browse. It stores the changes through the day, but then it keeps a single, latest daily one.


Might differ depending on your setup, but the default location should be 'Steam\userdata\*\287700'

Might be worth pointing out also that there's been a patch released now that addresses the mission 29 and 42 bug.