Game Save Manager does what it says on the tin. It will automatically scan through your save files, back them up, and later on restore them. I would say it’s an essential download for all PC gamers. I’ve only being using it for a short while and have already fallen in love with its feature set.
Its primary purpose is to search your PC for your game saves then put it inside an archived folder ready to be restored at a later date. It currently supports 809 games, and more added all the time with it letting you easily suggest games to be supported. You can manually add saves too if you don’t want to wait on official support.
Beyond that it can compress the save archive using 7-zip, a nice zip program if you’re on the lookout for one, and if you have a Dropbox account it can back-up your saves to your Dropbox folder to really make sure they’re backed up safely.
Aside from its save backup toolset it also has what it calls a “Steam Spreader”, a tool for moving Steam games around your hard drives. By default Steam installs all your games in the SteamApps folder, which if you’ve used an SSD to speed load times can fill up very fast. So the Steam Spreader moves your games to your much larger HDD and puts in a kind of special shortcut to trick Steam into thinking the games are still installed in the SteamApps folder. I’ve not used it myself so can’t say how good it is.
My main issues would be that you can’t seem to refine your saves much. You either backup all your saves from a game or none at all. For example I’m in the habit of making tons of saves in RPGs, and GSM wanted to backup and put my 500MB worth of Witcher save files on my dropbox account. Not a good idea. But there’s no way to make it just move the most recent save files for a slimmer back-up. Also I only know I have 500MB of Witcher save files because I checked last week, GSM doesn’t give any information on how large your save file directories are. At most you get this:
Also some games seem to crash the program when validating. In my case I had to remove Machinarium from being backed up (I had no saves anyway) to stop the program crashing.
However despite these issues it is a pretty damn useful tool and the extra features such as cloud saving and Steam Spreader make it all the sweeter. I strongly recommend this for all PC gamers out there who don’t want to lose their hundreds of hours of saves. Until we get SteamCloud on all games this is the next best thing.
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