Hello everyone,

I'm in the process of trying to synchronise savegames between laptop and desktop pc. I realised that quite some linux games store their savegames in .local/share, while some others are saved - I believe - in the install folder of the game.

Are there "typical" savegame locations which I have not listed? Is there a way to enforce games to choose a specific savegame location? Do you have general tips for savegame synchronisation on linux?

I'd love to use syncthing or dropbox so I have access to my savegames, but would hate to search, for every game that I purchase and install, a multitude of folders. Especially since it is impossible to hard-link the save-game folders to one location such as .local/share.

Any thoughts are very welcome.

Have a nice day,
greetings,
labuvetteducampus

I have seen a couple games (Tangledeep and I believe Hollow Knight) that store their saves under .config/unity3d/[company_name], even though the games have nothing to do with 3d or unity from an end user perspective.

(By the way, Tangledeep stores its saves as XML, making them pretty easy to view and even edit if you wish to do that sort of thing.)

Game Backup Monitor might work for you.

Just a disclaimer, I adapted GBM to support Linux, but it was written for Windows and can't be compiled from source using Linux. You can read more about Linux support on the web site if you're interested.

Thanks for the tip, this will probably help me finding out the savegame location. Dear sir, thank you for the tip and for programming such a nice utility!

However, I have a question: as I understand it, GBM does save a particular game's savegame to a folder that I have specified. Thats very nice indeed. Yet, for synchronisation to work, it would be necessary that the specified savegame folder is read by the game in one way or another, no? Is there a way to accomplish this?
To illustrate: I have a game on my laptop. GBM tracks me gaming and saves to specified savegame location. I synchronise the savegame folder with my desktop. Now, when I want to play said game on the desktop, I would have to manually replace the desktop's original savegame with the one saved in the savegame folder - every time I want to synchronise - right?


General question concerning "help wanted"-threads: I tagged this thread as "help wanted"-thread. Since you (potentially) receive reputation for helping, I need to know what to do in order for you to receive this reputation. Is it simply upvoting a specific reply, or is it necessary for the specific reply to be tagged as a "solution"?

greetings,
labuvetteducampus

There is no official location where savegames are universally stored or supposed to be stored, so every individual game will store their save games in a random location decided upon by the game developers. Historically in Linux and UNIX systems there were predefined locations where these things were intended to be stored, however a lot of the standardization that used to exist in the past have gone by the wayside over the years due to lack of deep understanding of the filesystem hierarchy by developers newer to the platform. This isn't unique to Linux either however, as games in Windows might save their savegames in the game's install folder, in a subfolder of the user's account, or any of a number of other locations as well.

In short it's a ripe mess with no real standardization, even though there are arguably defined locations where these things belong. The problem is that on platforms like Linux, Windows, and many others where the platform is open in the sense that developers can install software and its files more or less wherever they please with no scrutiny, and nobody enforcing compliance to a unified standard set of locations where things must be installed etc. - it is left up to the developer to decide, and they often if not mostly have no idea of any pre-existing standards, recommendations or guidelines and just more or less make up a location that makes sense to them and use it.

Same thing is true for character profile data, screenshots, or other data or configuration files.

Alternatively one could say there are many standard locations where these files are supposed to be, and the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from, so why not ignore them all and make a new one. :)

In even shorter - it's a ripe hot mess and will likely always be this way - unless the operating system vendor enforces standardization and requires software vendors to comply to standards or have the OS reject their software. Such systems tend to be highly closed in nature, walled gardens controlled and ruled with an iron fist which greatly restrict freedom of the consumer, developer and just about everyone else that isn't the vendor though.

So, being a ripe mess is actually better oddly enough.

Word, I already had this crap bug me out like crazy :D

@all: thanks a bunch for helping me, my problem is solved now!