For non steam games how do you sync saves between Steam Deck and Desktop?

NightOwl@lemmy.one to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 31 points –
18

I have Syncthing installed via pacman (since flatpaks cannot keep a daemon running). For every game that I care about, I find its save file, move it to a sync dir, and symlink it back to where it is expected. My savegame sync folder has folders for the many varied places that games like to hide their saves - "gamedir", local, locallow, "my documents", dot_config, etc. The most fun part is finding out where the appropriate proton prefix is.

If I was starting over again, there's a decky loader plugin that looks promising.

I have the same setup, but I am using the flatpak version of syncthing. It can run a daemon just fine, however I am running a user systems service. Works great and starts automatically in both desktop and game modes

Also using Syncthing. It was pretty simple to setup. I’ve been using it for syncing emulator saves mostly but also started using it for steam games that don’t have cloud support.

I’ve had zero issues and the syncing can be set to a low amount of seconds so it’s basically in real time. No need for the app to close and then sync. If I save while playing TOTK, I can see it on PC immediately.

If you have cloud storage available, either by a company or self-hosted, you can look into Ludusavi and OpenCloudSaves, both open source and using the same savegame path database.

Ludusavi is more mature with more features.

OpenCloudSaves aims to target better usability with the Deck specifically.

+1 to Ludusavi. It auto detects savegame paths based on pcgamingwiki. Great design!

There's a decky extension that will automatically backup game saves to various cloud storage types.

Oh I love decky. I'd love something automated that doesn't need me to go into desktop mode so I'll look for that.

For Epic and GOG games I use Heroic Launcher and for games that support it, it does the trick. The feature isn't fully stable yet and I remember specifying a path to saves manually, but once I did so, it synchronizes fine

I moved a Jubilee save from my Windows desktop to the Steam Deck once.

Never again. It's a hassle. I ended up only playing it on the Steam Deck henceforth.

Depends. Many games from Epic have that built in. For everything else I use Nextcloud. I think most people use Syncthing.