Steam Cloud Save Woes

So I play games across multiple computers, crazy right? I find the cloud save to be awesome, but lately it's been fucking me over. Something messed up with the cloud save last I switched computers prompting me to re-upload or download. I selected the one that said newer (upload) and now ALL my progress is wiped. The "newer" must have meant brand new. But what the hell? The game had been installed and ran before on both computers with the progress intact.

This happened with The Binding of Issac. All my completion progress, stats, unlocked characters, etc were wiped out.

Something a little different happened with Dungeons of Dredmor. It failed to sync my save progress and when I started it from a different computer I was reverted back to before my most recent game session save state. Auugh.

I quit both games gracefully. Anyone know what may causes this and how to prevent this from happening in the future? Not too happy about this.

Fundamentally, all it's really doing behind the scenes is a Dropbox-like syncing of a handful of files, without any special knowledge of your level of progress or such in the game. When it says 'newer' it probably just means the local files have a more recent timestamp than the cloud ones, but that could just be because you started a new game locally.

The other thing to note is that unlike Dropbox, it's not syncing continuously, only at certain points like when you start and exit a game. Anything that messes with those stages (e.g., being offline when launching the game, Steam or your PC crashing mid-game) could result in files not getting synced until you start it again.

The weird thing is it reverted to a new install with no existing save data for Binding of Issac. I've had the game installed on that computer and played it previously with the save progress synced correctly. It must have got corrupted or something but I add inadvertently uploaded the "new save."

Currently for Dungeons of Dredmor there is one save game that won't sync to the other PC. All other save games show up correctly except that one save. I loaded and re-saved that game and no dice.

It's pretty staggering how rubbish cloud syncing is on all these services.

Could be that Binding creates a savefile on install. If you still have your original progress on the other computer, you should be able to disable cloud sync there, play a bit and then re enable sync to get the same dialogue from Steam.

Yeap. I don't trust it at all. There is absolutely nothing graceful about Steam's cloud syncing.

Charles explanation is exactly what I've encountered, most recently when I was playing Sonic Racing. I played for a couple hours on my desktop, then started it up the next day on my laptop and for whatever reason it hadn't sync'd the progress from my desktop. I exited out and when it did kick in the sync it noted that there was an "older" save in the cloud that I knew was from my desktop session and a "newer" save on my local machine. It asked me what to do and I said to bring the "older" cloud save down and it's worked fine since.

Now I'm just confused.



I turned off cloud-syncing after a few save files got corrupted for reasons I could not discern (I only have one PC). I don't know if it was an issue with my specific setup or something on Steam's side of things but I'd rather risk corrupting the save game files myself locally instead of having it conveniently done for me through the cloud.

Binding of Issac definitely has cloud sync. How else was my save progressed wiped out across two different computers!

I was hoping for this but it never happened. After the save progress got wiped on one computer, when I switched to my other computer I never got prompted to download/upload. It had already gotten wiped...(Nooooooooo)