Sync Save Games Across Two Computers

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Hey friends, how are ya? I’m writing because I’ve got a very first-world problem and no idea how to solve it.

So, yesterday I began playing Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag for the first time on my PC, and I really enjoyed it. It being a Ubisoft game with their games connected to a server, I figured it would have cloud saving. Imagine my disappointment when I shut down my PC, move to the other part of the house with my laptop, install the game, and find my saves didn’t come over.

Now, sure, I could use a USB stick to copy the saves from the PC to the laptop, but I’m forgetful so I know I’ll forget to do that. What I’m looking for help with, is to find a way to sync the save files between the two PCs so I’ll always be able to play the most recent save regardless of machine.

So what I want is, basically:

I play the game on the PC, save it, then quit. Those saves get uploaded to a server somewhere via some software.
I turn on my laptop, and software checks to see if the files on the server are newer. If they are, it copies the files to the save game folder, and I load the game as normal.
When I go back to my PC, it downloads the save files from the cloud, and so I can continue from when I was on my laptop.

Basically, I want something like Steam cloud saving, but something I run myself, if that makes any sense, where I can specify which files to be synced.

I hope this makes sense because I’m not sure I’ve explained it very well. Thank you for your time.

2

Huh, can you choose where to save the files? If you can, I dunno, save them to a Dropbox directory that you can access from both computers?

ETA:

If you can’t, you might be able to symlink the directories so that you’ll be saving to the dropbox directory and not where the game thinks it is.

3

Sadly no, they’re in very specific save directories. For example, on my PC it would be:

D:\Uplay Games\Ubisoft Game Launcher\savegames\be337f0b-1b0d-43b7-b4cb-df00be757610\273

On my laptop it would probably be:

C:\Program Files\Ubisoft Game Launcher\savegames\be337f0b-1b0d-43b7-b4cb-df00be757610\273

Which is why I’m confused about this. It has to be something automatic. If it’s manual, like with Dropbox even, I’ll just forget to do it.

4

What’s this? Please bear in mind I’m a complete idiot.

5

This appears to explain it, you’ll pretty much fool the game into saving on the Dropbox directory, should work, it was how we used to move games on Steam to SSD drives, before they implemented it on the system itself.

6

Huh, so let me get this right.

On my PC, I use that Link Shell Extension to tell it that that save file directory is the source.
Then I drop a symbolic link to a dropbox folder?
Then, on my laptop, I repeat the process?

7

So, how I’d do it would be to run cmd, and then do something like, assuming I understood the paths:

mklink “D:\Uplay Games\Ubisoft Game Launcher\savegames\be337f0b-1b0d-43b7-b4cb-df00be757610\273” “insert path to Dropbox savegames directory here”

You’ll probably need to delete the 273 dir first, so, move the savefiles to the Dropbox dir first.

And then, do the same thing for the laptop. If it goes well, everytime the game saves or loads, it’ll be using the dropbox directory, which then gets replicated between PC’s.

But if the extension works it should be even easier.

8

Oh, so the dropbox folder is the “link source” and the actual ubisoft save folder is where the symlink goes?

9

Using the extension is looks like the opposite, Ubisoft dir is the source, symlink goes in the dropbox dir.

It’s just a way to fool the system into thinking a dir is another, you can try it out on stuff you don’t need first, to get a feel of how it works, when you copy a file to the directory and it shows up in the other.

10

Okay I’ll give this a whirl, thank you!

11

Hope it works.

12

Okay, so on my desktop I made the actual save game folder the source and put the symlink in Dropbox.

Sadly, on my laptop, the symlinked folder isn’t showing up at all.

Ugh, I wonder if I did something wrong.

13

Is the symlink working? So, if you save a file to the save game folder it shows up on the dropbox one?

14

Yup, looks to be showing up on my desktop.

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Lemme double-check the sync settings on the laptop.

Oh, they’re showing up now. Weird. Okay, now I’ll try to set up the link here on the laptop.

15

Dropbox probably doesn’t sync empty folders or something like that. Lots of moving parts, lots of details that might need tinkering with.

16

Gah it didn’t work. The thing created a whole new folder with " - SymbolicLink" rather than using the existing one:

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17

You probably created a new directory for the target symlink instead of using the directory that’s already there.

ETA:
Or if using the Extension, you could try to do it the other way around on the laptop, have the dropbox dir be the source, and create a 273 target in the Ubisoft dir.

18

Did you manage to make it work?

19

Not yet, sorry had some errands to run. I’ll try again in a bit.

20

np :D