Smiley's Life

Valve introduced a sub-service of their content delivery system Steam last November called Steam Cloud, which is basically a system to store your saved games on Steam servers as well, so that you could pick up where you left off on any other PCs you might have, without needing to do anything. The service sounds well, but sadly, only supports a limited number of games, most of them from 2008 and later. Games like Half-Life 2 and Portal were excluded with a notice from Valve that they will be supported in the future. In addition, Steam Cloud only supports games purchased and/or activated through Steam.

But with a little willpower and about 5 minutes, one could make his own Steam Cloud without repurchasing games or even paying a single dime. This can be done with Dropbox, a service currently in alpha beta which can sync a single folder across all of your Windows PCs, Linux computers and Macs. You don’t have to be a computer expert, too; you just need to have an advanced knowledge of computers and not have the irrational fear of black-background-white-text console windows many people have.

• It is strongly advised to backup your saved games before playing with junctions, as they can cause you to lose some of them if you accidently do something you shouldn’t.

1. First of all, go to dropbox.com and sign up for a free account.
2. After you’ve signed up, install the desktop application on the computers you’d like to sync. A new folder will appear in your My Documents folder called “My Dropbox”. That’s the folder which will now be synced in realtime with the other computers.
3. If you use XP: Once that’s done, download and extract Junction from Microsoft’s website. Junction is a utility for creating junctions on NTFS file system drives. A junction is a virtual “shortcut” mechanism for folders, which is mainly used for times when you want an application to save data at another place instead of its default one. (In case you can’t change the location in the settings. Like having Firefox save your profile data in a more visible place.) It’s recommended to extract Junction to some easy-to-type folder on your hard drive. I extracted it to C:\Junction.
4. Now, think about where you’d like to have your saved games in your new Dropbox. I keep mine in a folder named “Steam game saves”. (NOTE: Don’t make a folder for each game in it! That will be done later.) Leave the window open once you’ve decided.
5. Track down where your games save your progress. For Steam-distributed games by Valve excluding Left 4 Dead and Valve games release afterwards, your saves probably reside in “C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\<your Steam username>\<game name>\<game name>\SAVE”. For other Steam-distributed games, they will reside somewhere in “C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\<game name>”. If you can’t find your saved games, search for it on Google. When you find that directory, leave the window open.
6. If you use XP: Click your “Start” button and choose “Run…”. Type in cmd and press Return/Enter on your keyboard.
7. If you use Vista/7: Click on “All Programs”, open the “Accessories” menu and right-click “Command Prompt”. Select “Run as Admin” and accept the UAC prompt.
8. If you use XP: In the new console window, type in the address to where you’ve extracted Junction and the executable in it. For example, it would be “C:\Junction\junction.exe” for me. (Don’t press Enter yet!)
9. If you use Vista/7: In the new console window, type “mklink /J ” (leave a trailing space).
10. After it, type in the location (or copy it from the address bar of the Windows Explorer window containing your Dropbox by selecting “Copy” in the Explorer window and afterwards right-clicking the icon on the Command Prompt’s title bar, and choosing “Paste” in “Edit”.) of where you’d like to keep the saved games (in Dropbox) in quotation marks, along with the game’s name (or any name you’d like) after it as if the folder existed.
11. Finally, type in the location (or copy it the same way you copied the path in the previous step) of where the games are actually saved in quotation marks.
12. Now, hit Enter. If the window says the junction was created, it went successfully. If not, read the error and retry the operation.
13. On your other computers, do the exact same steps but make sure you reverse the junction — make the saved games folder in your games folders the junction and set the folder in your Dropbox as the target. In other words, type in the directories in reverse order: first where the games would actually be saved, and then where they are right now in your Dropbox. Make sure to delete the saved games directory (not the one in your Dropbox!) on your other computers first.

From now on, when your games (on computers other than the first) try to load your progress on their original directory, they will actually access the folder on your Dropbox without knowing this. (This method theoretically [and practically. I didn’t have any problems with it so far and I’ve used it for over a month.] has no additional problems than the ones present before you made the Junction.) Test your games and see if they can load your saves. If they can, you did it! If they can’t, check your steps and look inside the folders. If you’re using Windows Vista, a little arrow may appear on a junction’s icon to let you know it’s not a real folder.

NOTE: Don’t delete the junctions by hand later, simply run Junction again but this time only with the junction’s location (the link, not where the games actually are) and with “-d” (without quotation marks) preceding the path. If you delete it through Windows Explorer or through other apps, you may accidentally delete the real folder.

And there you have it: your own Steam Cloud remake. The best part about using Dropbox instead is that, unlike other syncing services, Dropbox only uploads and downloads the parts changed in a file, and not the whole file again, which makes syncing a lot faster in some cases.

Image credits:

• Cloud by nicubunu, released to the public domain on Open Clip Art Library.
• File:Steam logo.svg adapted from Steam’s logo, uploaded to Wikipedia by Skybon under a fair use license for non-free logos.