Steam is the most used gaming platform on PC, and there are thousands of games that we can add to our library. Steam offers Steam Cloud as a means to save our games and configurations, but these are also saved in the PC storage, although the problem is where… if you want to make a backup of your games , we will tell you in this article where are really saved.
Making a backup copy of your game saves on Steam can have a utility beyond the risk of losing data, and in some cases you may want to test games but you do not want to risk losing what you have saved ( for example, you might want to raze a town in Skyrim but then restore the previous save to restore the state where nothing happened). And, since you can’t touch the data stored in the cloud, it’s always good to have access to the files stored on your hard drive to manipulate them at your whim.
Where are the games saved on Steam?
First of all, we must warn you that you should be careful how you handle your save game files, since modifying these files or games could lead, in some cases, to corruption and loss of data. Therefore, do this at your own risk. That said, as mentioned before, Steam saves games both in the cloud and locally on your hard drive or SSD, so let’s see where.
As a general rule, games usually save games in their own installation folder, which you will find in C:Program Files (x86)Steamuserdata (if you have Steam installed in another location, you must manually go to the folder where you have it and then to userdata).
As you can see in the screenshot that we have put above these lines, you will find several directories with a series of numbers, which corresponds to the IDs of the users with whom you have logged into Steam on your PC (if you have only used one account, there will be only one folder). Inside you will have several folders also with numbers, which correspond to the games and which are the ones that you must copy to make a backup.
However, many games use their own folders to make backups, and the problem is that each saves it where the developer sees fit. For this reason, you should also look in the Documents folder of your Windows PC (you can access it from the quick access in any file explorer), where you will see that the folders have the name of either the games or the developer.
Finally, the most common location where Steam game saves are saved, and the one you should really look at, is the “my games” folder within Documents. You can find it here: “C:UsersXXXDocumentsmy games” changing the XXX to your Windows username. Here you will see a large number of folders with the names of the games, and this is where most save the games and it is, therefore, the one that you should copy for your backup copies.
Logically, at the time you want to restore any of your saved games, it is in these same locations where you must copy them.