How can I backup my games saves in Windows XP, Vista/7?
As the question stated, just how can I backup my game saves?
I play lots of games; some of them, like Skyrim, are using the following directory in Vista/7:
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Mygames\
However, where can I locate the rest of the games?
I don't mean all of them, just the most common locations of game saves that most games use in Windows XP and Windows Vista/7 so I can back them up.
Edit:
What I mean is the locations that games most commonly use, not just one location.
For example, I have Skyrim, Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning, Resident Evil: Operation Racoon City, Binary Domain, Rage, Tomb Raider: Underworld, Dead Space, and Amnesia in the directory I provided. I only found Reckoning and Skyrim, plus Reckoning doesn't look like game saves at all because it only contains *.ini files, which I believe are settings files.
The most common savegame locations are:
- My Documents (usually subfolders, often 'My Games' or the publisher's name)
- Saved Games folder introduced in Vista (I think)
- AppData (C:\Users\%account%\AppData)
- Steam's userdata folder (in the Steam directory, usually backed up automatically to the cloud)
- The game's folder, mostly used by ancient games
There is a wiki with a list of the savegame locations for many games
Save Game Locations Wiki
There are programs which can help you with that, which are dealing with the path for saves, for a quite long list of possible games (and you can also add more to the list).
For example, GameSave Manager.
You can set it to backup to any folder, and I think it has a specific setting for Dropbox. You can also schedule it to do the backup regularly.
I tried it, it works quite good. Be careful though about disk space though, some games are taking a lot of space in saves (The Witcher, for example)
You can look up the game's article at the PC Gaming Wiki. Save game locations are usually written in each game's article there. It also usually notes other details, like if the game saves to cloud storage.