GOG cutting cloud save storage

[jfreund]

I'm pretty sure the previous limit was 1GB per game. I remember having to delete a lot of Witcher 3 saves because of the limit. GOG is cutting it by 80% to 200MB.

 

[Absalom]

1GB? When did saves get so large? I always thought they were a couple of MB, 5MB tops.

 

[d3athf1sh]

WHAT? man i've got a ton of Cyberpunk saves that's really gonna piss me off if they get deleted.

1GB? When did saves get so large? I always thought they were a couple of MB, 5MB tops.

yeah i just looked and in my cyberpunk save folder i have 419 files which equals 588MB. i don't actually have 419 saves though, each one contains 3 files, plus there's a user.gls file (probably system settings).

actually just did the math and yeah, they're roughly ~5MB a piece. but still kind of sucks they're doing this. they could at least grandfather in the ones you already have and make it something that goes into affect going forward.

edit: what's even more weird is they never sent an email about it and it's not anything that appears in the app. I say that but for some reason gog updates seem to always fail on my sytem. it was the same for years then it finally worked when cyberpunk 2.0 dropped, now i'm stuck on some other version. only place i see anything mentioned about it is in the change log from april, it says "changes were made to cloud storage". but mine still isn't even updated to that version yet.

 

[pendragon1]

just move to local saves, like we used to...

but still sucks you can't have more than 20 saves in a game that large

for what? i think most ive had in any game was 5-6.

 

[NattyKathy]

Turning off cloud saves is one of the first things I do when installing a launcher (along with disabling overlay, controller hijacking support, and if allowed, auto-updates).

This sux for people who actually use cloud saves though. As pointed out, 200MB total per account is not actually that much considering savefiles for big open-world games are basically a big database of quest states and gameworld data, and players of big open-world games tend to generate a lot of saves.

 

[LukeTbk]

200MB total per account

200MB per games I think, which is still quite considerable.

WHAT? man i've got a ton of Cyberpunk saves that's really gonna piss me off if they get deleted.

If they go and sync delete your local save folder that would be bad, but I would doubt that (they clearly state that it will not), it is probably only on the cloud that they only keep the 200mb latest one.

 

[Delicieuxz]

I usually cull my saves if they become too numerous, but I'm not sure which game reasonably uses that much space for save files. The worst offender for save files I recall noticing was CDPR's own Witcher 2, which constantly creates new autosaves in a new save file, until there are hundreds of unidentifiable saves that progressively slow-down the loading of the game, and will eventually cause the game to crash, until the save-file directory is cleaned out.

I just hope GoG will free up space by deleting oldest saves and not newer ones. Would be pretty crap to lose your latest progress in a game due to not having enough free cloud space.

 

[Armenius]

200MB per games I think, which is still quite considerable.


If they go and sync delete your local save folder that would be bad, but I would doubt that (they clearly state that it will not), it is probably only on the cloud that they only keep the 200mb latest one.

Yeah, 200MB per game is pretty decent. It's different per game in Steam, but I've seen it range from as little as 100MB to as much as 1GB per game.

 

[Prince Valiant]

1GB? When did saves get so large? I always thought they were a couple of MB, 5MB tops.

Depends on the game and how they handle saves.

I usually cull my saves if they become too numerous, but I'm not sure which game reasonably uses that much space for save files. The worst offender for save files I recall noticing was CDPR's own Witcher 2, which constantly creates new autosaves in a new save file, until there are hundreds of unidentifiable saves that progressively slow-down the loading of the game, and will eventually cause the game to crash, until the save-file directory is cleaned out.

I just hope GoG will free up space by deleting oldest saves and not newer ones. Would be pretty crap to lose your latest progress in a game due to not having enough free cloud space.

Same here, I usually only check after I finish a game though.

 

[LukeTbk]

I just hope GoG will free up space by deleting oldest saves and not newer ones. Would be pretty crap to lose your latest progress in a game due to not having enough free cloud space.

You need to lose your local hard drive with the save game for a reason for that to happen (or do some people use some only cloud option ?)

Gog statement say:
After August 31st, 2024, we will begin deleting files from our Cloud Storage service. First and foremost we will delete unnecessary files – things that are not at all related to your game, but have found their way into the Cloud Save folder. Next, we will remove save game files, starting from the oldest and stop when the remaining files fit the allocation limit.

 

[Sycraft]

You need to lose your local hard drive with the save game for a reason for that to happen (or do some people use some only cloud option ?)

Gog statement say:
After August 31st, 2024, we will begin deleting files from our Cloud Storage service. First and foremost we will delete unnecessary files – things that are not at all related to your game, but have found their way into the Cloud Save folder. Next, we will remove save game files, starting from the oldest and stop when the remaining files fit the allocation limit.

Honestly that works fine for me. What I really want out of cloud saves are two things:

1) The ability to play back and forth between my laptop and desktop. This is the biggest one. I usually play on my desktop, but if I want to fire up a game on my laptop I don't want to have to go and manually copy the save around. Only need the latest one for that though. So this works fine.

2) Recovery in the event of disk failure. Hopefully something I don't have to deal with, but if I do have my main drive fail I don't back up my save games myself, so it would be good to have a backup. Again, really only the latest ones are needed for that.

While I wouldn't mind having a record of all my save games ever if I reinstall or something, it really isn't necessary.

 

[LukeTbk]

The: First and foremost we will delete unnecessary files – things that are not at all related to your game, but have found their way into the Cloud Save folder. part, make it sound a bit did people started to use gog cloud saving has a free unlimited dropbox too much ?

Github and others that offer free cloud storage in some way are probably bombarded of people using them as free data cloud storage and not for code base-game saved file, maybe not as if they have the ability to know what save game should look like for each game and seem able to delete them, they would have simply just deleted all of those.

 

[Lakados]

The: First and foremost we will delete unnecessary files – things that are not at all related to your game, but have found their way into the Cloud Save folder. part, make it sound a bit did people started to use gog cloud saving has a free unlimited dropbox too much ?

Github and others that offer free cloud storage in some way are probably bombarded of people using them as free cloud storage, maybe not as if they have the ability to know what save game should look like for each game and seem able to delete them, they would have simply just deleted all of those.

That and some game mods can get crazy with save files and such.

 

[Absalom]

GTA5 saves are a measly 0.5MB per save. My endgame Elden Ring saves are a whopping 30MB per save. What the hell are you storing in that save, Miyazaki?

 

[Sycraft]

The: First and foremost we will delete unnecessary files – things that are not at all related to your game, but have found their way into the Cloud Save folder. part, make it sound a bit did people started to use gog cloud saving has a free unlimited dropbox too much ?

Github and others that offer free cloud storage in some way are probably bombarded of people using them as free data cloud storage and not for code base-game saved file, maybe not as if they have the ability to know what save game should look like for each game and seem able to delete them, they would have simply just deleted all of those.

It's something every "cloud" data service has discovered: Offer your users unlimited space, they'll go fucking nuts. Not most of them, but a few people will just fill it full of shit and your costs will be huge.

 

[DanNeely]

It's something every "cloud" data service has discovered: Offer your users unlimited space, they'll go fucking nuts. Not most of them, but a few people will just fill it full of shit and your costs will be huge.

and not just in the ways a normal person could have anticipated. Years ago I remember some lunatic writing a tool to use your gmail account as a cloud file system. Google drive eventually made that level of crazy obsolete.

 

[d3athf1sh]

just move to local saves, like we used to...


for what? i think most ive had in any game was 5-6.

yeah, i had some saves from the older version where i did a hack with a ton of money then before 2.0 dropped i started a few games with the different paths and did the money trick so if i ever want to start a new game i can use those and the game will upgrade those saves to the new version but retain the money.

then when i'm playin i always keep multiple saves incase one get's corrupted or i miss something i need to double back on. but yeah a lot of them are pointless now.

 

[Sycraft]

and not just in the ways a normal person could have anticipated. Years ago I remember some lunatic writing a tool to use your gmail account as a cloud file system. Google drive eventually made that level of crazy obsolete.

Yep. Like at work we got a contract with Box, which is sort of like corporate DropBox and it was unlimited. I mean no big deal right? A university with lots of resources, surely people will use it as intended to share files and such, right? Nope, some departments decided like this sounded like a great way to do backups on the cheap. They'd clone their whole NAS to it. One even set up scripts to go and fetch files off of all the user systems and back those up and was using nearly a petabyte of data.

Needless to say when the contract came up, suddenly there was a limit: 50GB per person.

Some people will just go ham when you say "unlimited".

That aside as others have noted some games go ham, particularly if they save mods and such in the folder that GOG backs up. I mean shit, my old Civ 4 folder was over a gig from all the mods and shit I put in it.

 

[Armenius]

GTA5 saves are a measly 0.5MB per save. My endgame Elden Ring saves are a whopping 30MB per save. What the hell are you storing in that save, Miyazaki?

Elden Ring is more complex with how it needs to save your world and character states. There are unique persistent things it needs to keep track of. GTA5, while having its own big open world map, does not need to keep track of so many specific things.