How to sync or download your Steam Cloud Saves

Steam cloud saves not syncing? You can just download them.

(Image credit: Pixabay - zsoravecz)

Cloud sync capability is becoming a more prevalent part of our lives, and its clear that more and more of our data is going to end up stored in the cloud. That may free up storage space on our devices, but it can be such a pain when it doesn't work properly. Especially when your Steam Cloud Saves won't sync.

Thankfully there is a way to manually download your Steam Cloud Saves, should the need arise.

You might be planning to do some solo gaming out and about, where there's little chance of an internet connection, but you don't want to turn your laptop on yet. Or maybe you want to show off your characters new moves or armour to a friend on their laptop, somewhere the internet doesn't live.

Whatever your reason for needing to reach you Steam Cloud Saves, here's how to find them, and also how to enable Steam Cloud Sync, in case that's accidentally been turned off, somehow.

Enable Steam Cloud Sync

First, if your issue is that your games saves wont sync, try right clicking on the game in your Steam library and selecting Properties. From there, under the General tab, make sure you check on Keep games save in the Steam Cloud for [game].

Hopefully, after a moment, your saves should appear in the games save menu. If not, there is another solution...

Manually download Steam Cloud Saves

If that didn't work, you may want to uncheck Keep games save in the Steam Cloud again, if you're using the device you intend to play on. That's just so you don't confuse Steam, or yourself.

Then simply navigate to the View Steam Cloud page on the Steam website, and get yourself logged in, if you're not already. Once there, you should be able to pick out which game you're trying to download the saves for (use Ctrl+F to search the page), and click Show Files in the right hand column.

Then it's a case of finding the save you want, and downloading it to where you need it to be—whether that's a external hard drive, or your chosen games save directory. Saves are stored in different places on a per-game basis, so have a quick online search to see where you're likely to find the save file location for each specific game.

And, there you go; you should now be able to continue where you left off. Don't forget you've turned sync off for that game though, or you'll probably end up back here again at some point, wondering why your game saves won't sync.

Having been obsessed with game mechanics, computers and graphics for three decades, Katie took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni and has been writing about digital games, tabletop games and gaming technology for over five years since. She can be found facilitating board game design workshops and optimising everything in her path.