Your Skyrim save data is at risk of being lost forever, publisher warns

Cloud saves are one of the lifesavers in the modern age of gaming. Knowing that your save is, hopefully, safely stored away in some digital cloud is a huge help.

However, we do run the risk of losing those saves if something happens to the cloud storage, or if the storage owner wants to streamline their servers.

It might be time to locally back up your Skyrim save files

Something akin to this is happening with Good Old Games and their owner CD Projekt Red as the company has stated they are going to put a size limit on save files stored on their servers.

Now, not every game is supported by the magical cloud, but chunky games like Skyrim definitely are and those save files are not known for being tiny.

Consider this your warning to back up your files locally just in case they get deleted forever in this system change. Of course, this only applies if you’re using GOG to play your games, but that’s still a sizable number of gamers out there.

Games you’re going to want to keep an eye on are titles like Skyrim, Baldur’s Gate 3, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Pillars of Eternity, or even Fallout 4.

GOG plan to start removing large files over 200mb on 31 August, so you’ve got plenty of time to grab them from the cloud and back them up locally.

Cloud saves are, however, supposed to be a form of back up so you might want to make multiple copies of your save files and keep them on separate storage like a thumb drive, especially if you’ve put hundreds of hours into a Skyrim character.

Nobody needs the tears I had in 1997 when my 80 hour Final Fantasy VII save was corrupted on a Sony memory card. That even makes me sad now, many, many years later.