Xbox's automatic cloud saves just killed my Floppy Knights data.

I hate the cloud. Well, I hate the Xbox's complete lack of control of the cloud at least.

I've been playing Floppy Knights on Game Pass. It's on both PC and Xbox and I've been going back and forth between both version, which share a save in the cloud. Something happened to my PC save file when I tried to fire it up there. Some sort of error about not being able to sync properly, and it asked me if I wanted to use an older save instead. It told me nothing about what this older save was, and with no way to check what the hell it was, I just assumed it was some sort of alternate save made somewhere at some point by the almighty cloud god, or maybe a console save or something. Turns out, whatever the hell it pulled from was a completely fresh save. "Well.... Guess I'll fire up my console version and play it there instead.", not realizing in the moment that doing so was going to automatically pull in the new PC cloud save and overwrite my progress there too. "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck".

It's a shame because I was really enjoying the game. In this, The Year of the Tile Game, 2022 I don't know if it's necessarily the deepest one of those, but it was pretty cute, and combined it with some deck building aspects, which I'm down for as something of a card fetishist. I could have seen it making my game of the year list this year, and now I just feel super bad that I probably won't be able to go back to it after being about 3/4 of the way done with it. But if you need to play another tile game this year, maybe check out Floppy Knights.

My internet crapped out recently for the span of about two hours during my workday. Waiting for it to come back up (so I could continue working) I thought I'd boot up Steam and play more FF6 Pixel Remaster. It warned me that as I was offline, the cloud couldn't be accessed, and I literally rolled the "Are my saves on the cloud or local?" dice on a 17-hour save file. Lucky for me it turned out they were all local. Sorry this happened to you duder :( This sucks.

It's happened again. Didn't even get a sync error message this time. Started up Rainbow Billy on PC for the first time after getting a few hours in on console. It just didn't pull in my console save. Was treated to a new game. Panicked remembering what happen last time and knowing I have absolutely no control over what happens next. Sure enough, Xbox's brain dead system synced the nothing ass PC data back to my console and now the console data's gone too. Pretty convinced that I'm just never going to touch anything Xbox cross-platform going forward.

Oh no, I feel so bad for you. Well, I hope Xbox's Automatic Cloud Saves improves in the future.

I had this happen quite a few times only ever lost a few hours, launching from quick resume before the wifi connects is really iffy on Xbox.

Like... just give me an option to manage these saves manually. I get you want your "seamless experience" or whatever but at least bury an option in a menu somewhere. This stuff is always going to be wonky at some point. That's all tech. It's never flawless. Everything needs a back-up. I just don't get it.

There is, or at least used to be a warning that pops up on console when you have saves desynched. I've had this issue when playing a game on different Xboxes (I have my old Xbox One set up in another room from my Series) and it always gives me a warning when the saves get desynched.

Have you tried disconnecting your console where the good save is from the Internet, loading up the game, and then saving and then turning on the Internet to save again and force a resynch as a possible kludge solution?

@bigsocrates: That was my first thought, but they don't let you start Game Pass games if you're not connected to the internet.

@brian_: What about shutting down the game on PC and deleting the cloud save? Wouldn't that cause it to upload the local save the next time you open the game on Xbox?

@bigsocrates: I don't think there's any way to get at the cloud save on PC. Or if there is, I've never been able to find it.

@brian_: Does this not work?

https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/cloud-gaming/manage-storage

Sorry, I'm not trying to be pedantic, honestly, I'm trying to figure out a way to help.

@bigsocrates: Nah. That's just for managing saves for games you've streamed. Not ones you installed on your PC through the Xbox app.

EDIT: Also, the only option is to "Delete your save everywhere" which I bet would include local console saves once you launched the console game while online.

That sucks. Its not ideal but maybe you could download a complete save file and play the levels you haven't beat. Floppy Knights is underrated. Haven't seen much talk about it.

@brian_: You could test that by trying it with a game you haven't played yet. Just get like 10 minutes in, save, turn off console, delete everywhere, see if it preserves the console save?

If it does even if you're playing locally you might be able to boot a game up on streaming and use the delete everywhere function to get rid of the bad PC save.

I realize this is super convoluted but if it did work it would be better than potentially losing hours of progress in the future. Plus you could become a folk hero to the Game Pass community.

@bigsocrates: Tested. Can confirm. It totally deletes the local console save once you start the game.

@brian_: It never ceases to amaze me how all these services companies have so many employees and designers and they never seem to understand basic things about how users might use their services.

I can't really apologize on behalf of Microsoft but I can shake my fist at them in solidarity.

*Shake shake*

*Shake shake*

Don't shake the baby.

Reading through this just reinforces how frustrating Microsoft's weird hubris about not copying the competition for this stuff is. Steam's cloud save system is far from perfect but at least it gives you options to avoid data loss. Same with Epic's. All Microsoft has to do is copy the functionality of one of those two and this whole issue would go away but they won't until something ugly enough that it forces them to happens. Across all of their products, they never trust the user and always seem to assume their heavy-handed approach is the best way forward for everything.

It's the same thing that happened with the PC Xbox Game Pass app before. For almost a decade, it siloed off installs and would make portions of your storage inaccessible while often forcing you to install games to your C drive. Even past that, if you did a reinstall of Windows, all of your old Game Pass game installs would become invalid and you'd have reinstall them all from scratch (oh and if you didn't delete those games before you did the reinstall, have fun. They locked you out of the directory so you had to do a bunch of sketchy permissions and command line tomfoolery to delete them). You also didn't have the option to get the Xbox app to find your old installs, which is a feature that Steam, Battlenet, GOG, and others have all had for over a decade now. Even now that Xbox have finally lifted some of the ridiculous install restrictions they used to have, they still can't have most of the basic functionality of the competition.

Microsoft is one of the largest tech companies in the world with seemingly unlimited resources and people at their disposal yet they can't be bothered to improve most of their services have the same baseline level of competency found in their competition. They'd rather tell you how good their stuff is than do the work to make it good.

@ben_h: They also make Windows so presumably know how it works, which should make it easy for them to preserve games on reinstall.

Here they don't even have to copy the competition. They can copy themselves. As I said, save protection works if you have multiple Xboxes. It has always warned me before synching and allowed me to opt out. Just implement the same system on PC and also let you manage your saves on PC the same way you can via Xbox. It's not rocket surgery.

It's also not just a Microsoft issue. It's endemic in the major tech OS providers, and I think that partially explains it. Microsoft the games company does this okay but Microsoft the Windows company on the PC side does it very badly because all of these companies are obsessed with not letting users do anything to their own machines. Windows probably only allows any kind of user control over drivers and such because it's a legacy function and users (and corporate IT) would get mad if it were removed. But phone OSes and Macs try to limit you as much as possible (as does Windows.)

I do think part of it is because young people, growing up with phones instead of PCs, often don't know how to do the things we had to learn. I've been shocked at how un tech savvy some young people actually are. They know how to use Instagram and other apps but you start talking registries and bioses and they don't even know what they are. Not so true for gamers, and maybe was also true for normal people 25 years ago, but I don't think digital knowledge is advancing as I expected when I was a young nerd.