If you’re a gamer, one of the most precious things to you will probably be those save games. They represent hours of tweaking stats, completing missions and collecting loot and it’s absolutely devastating to have to restart following a disk crash or similar. When I lost my Trackmania progress to one such problem (ok.. I accidently deleted my saved games folder), I went on the hunt for a solution and stumbled upon GameSave Manager.
GameSave Manager (GSM) is a free program available as an 8MB download which will – either on demand or by a schedule – backup the saved games files of your installed games and keep them safe for you. They don’t get uploaded to the GSM servers, but instead let you upload them to Dropbox, an FTP server or simply just put them onto an external hard drive or media for safe keeping. It’s compatible with any recent version of Windows (XP, Vista and 7 – both 32 and 64 bit versions).
The best thing I found about GSM is that it’s totally automated. From the moment you click go, it will scan your system, find your saved games, package them up into an archive and then store them away. You can go for a coffee whilst it’s working away, come back and everything will be done.
Although GSM has a database of games – which it updates relatively often in order to cover the new releases – you can add custom locations for it to backup for you allowing you to store the saved games regardless of them being officially supported or not. The database has a massive 730 games in total, so you can be fairly confident that the majority of your saved games files are going to show up on GSM.
The user interface is really fast and although it suffers from a few garish colour choices in places (small red and black text on bright green background), it’s surprisingly easy to use. Without adjusting any of the settings, you can have a backup running in 2 clicks.
When it comes to the inevitable day that you have to restore your saved game files, GSM will validate the archive to make sure it’s not going to screw it up your system when it restores it. It’s done after it creates the archive too to give you complete peace of mind.
A full backup of all my 41 installed games came to a whopping 1.4GB although it took less than 10 minutes from start to finish (including verifying the backup). To test the recovery procedure, I copied the archive to a USB stick and over to another machine which had a few common games installed. GSM immediately picked up which saved games it could recover and put them back into place to me. I was really impressed at the speed at which it did it and the fact that it managed to cope with the games being installed in a completely different directory to the PC which made the backup. In fact, it took longer to copy the archive over to the USB stick than it did to recover the backup.
If you’re a PC gamer, I can’t recommend this program enough. Everybody knows the importance of backing things up, but when games developers put their saved games all over the place, it’s really hard to do that. GameSave Manager takes all the stress and problems away from that and does a fantastic job and aside from needing a cosmetic update perhaps, I can’t find any faults with it at all. The easiest 5/5 I’ve given yet.