I’ve always found transferring saved games between computers to be a nuisance—especially across different systems—continuing a game on one from the other is…trouble. Can’t they just sync? Steam Cloud is nice, but not all games support it, support it cross-platform or happen to be Steam games at all, requiring you to transfer them manually.* Not fun.

So I came up with my own solution. With a little bit of upfront work there is a way to essentially set up cloud saves for all of your games across all of your computers, cross-platform.

Setup:

Download and install the desktop client app for a [cloud] service like Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Nextcloud, etc… on all systems. Create a “Saved Games” folder on your [cloud] drive.

NOTE: The examples below are for Windows and macOS, but principally this should be applicable to other systems like Linux if the cloud service you are using has a desktop client for all the systems you are syncing across.

Windows:

If you have saved games within “~\My Games” move them all to the [cloud] “Saved Games” folder and delete “~\My Games”.

Create a proxy junction point: “My Games” to point to the new [cloud] “Saved Games” (replace CLOUD with your [cloud] directory): ¹

mklink /J “C:\Users\%username%\My Games\” “C:\Users\%username%\CLOUD\Saved Games\”

¹ this will allow you to move your all of your saved games to another location later and change only this one junction instead of redoing all of them for each game…

Locate and move each game’s save folder to “Saved Games” on the [cloud].

Create junction points for the game save folders you moved to the cloud (using the proxy junction in the destination path):

Pillars of Eternity (Example):

mklink /J “C:\Users\%username%\Saved Games\Pillars of Eternity\” “C:\Users\%username%\Documents\My Games\Pillars of Eternity\”

If you want to hide a junction point on Windows, just right click and select Hidden in Properties.

macOS:

Create a proxy symbolic link: “Saved Games” to point to [cloud] “Saved Games” (replace CLOUD with your [cloud] directory): ²

ln -s ~/CLOUD/Saved\ Games/ ~/Documents/Saved\ Games

² this will allow you to move all of your saved games to another location later and change only this one symbolic link instead of redoing all of them for each game…)

Locate the saves folder for the game and move/merge it into “Saved Games” on the [cloud] drive.

Create a symbolic link for the save folder of each game:

Pillars of Eternity (Example):

ln -s ~/Documents/Saved\ Games/Pillars\ of\ Eternity/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/Pillars\ of\ Eternity/Saved\ Games

If you want to hide a symbolic link on macOS, use:

chflags -h hidden [path to symbolic link]

Done. Cloud sync for all games across platforms. If you ever want to move your entire cloud saved game library, just replace the proxies on each system to point to the new location.