Is it better to disable steam cloud

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Jaskan
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Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by Jaskan » Thu, 2. Dec 21, 12:44

Ever since my PC did blue screen couple of weeks back whilst x4 was playing, been getting message when launching x4 saying
"steam was unbale to sync with cloud, you loose data if you continue to launch x4"

Also today x4 crashed and on relaunch got this message again, later i realised as the latest save game appeared on x4 , it was an older save, all the auto saves from the previous hours of the game were lost.

A bit of internet research on steam unable to sync resulted in the advice that, its best to turn of steam cloud feature, cause it has a bug where if the game crashes or your pc crashes , all the saves are lost cause they were written to cloud, and that system does not handle crash well.

I dont play x4 on multiple machines so dont really need the feature, but i found it really convenient when moving to new PC.

Do you know about this issue, and what's Egosoft recommendation on this issue, that steam cloud has a bug that means all saves of given session are lost of either pc crash or game crash ?

LameFox
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by LameFox » Thu, 2. Dec 21, 12:49

I got a message about being unable to sync, verifying files didn't help, so I just turned it off. To be perfectly honest I had no idea it was on in the first place! I certainly wasn't relying on steam to preserve my saves.
***modified***

budforceuk
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by budforceuk » Thu, 2. Dec 21, 13:33

Absolutely fine provided you don't have to reformat your hard drive or if in the very unlikely event it fails, you'll loose your save.

dtpsprt
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by dtpsprt » Thu, 2. Dec 21, 15:19

It's way better to disable Steam Cloud for the reason that after you have saved your game it needs to be transferred to the Cloud. If you shut down Steam (or the computer) before it's finished it will corrupt your Steam Cloud saved game and at best will result in the game marked as *modified* even though it is vanilla(!!!) at worst the Cloud will "override" your computer and the save will be unplayable. And all this without mentioning what will happen if Steam decides to "update" while you are playing or Steam crushes out!!!

Slashman
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by Slashman » Thu, 2. Dec 21, 19:23

dtpsprt wrote:
Thu, 2. Dec 21, 15:19
It's way better to disable Steam Cloud for the reason that after you have saved your game it needs to be transferred to the Cloud. If you shut down Steam (or the computer) before it's finished it will corrupt your Steam Cloud saved game and at best will result in the game marked as *modified* even though it is vanilla(!!!) at worst the Cloud will "override" your computer and the save will be unplayable. And all this without mentioning what will happen if Steam decides to "update" while you are playing or Steam crushes out!!!
I've never had that happen in any Steam game...and I own a LOT of Steam games. So is that specific to x4?
If you want a different perspective, stand on your head.

Bastelfred
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by Bastelfred » Thu, 2. Dec 21, 19:33

Slashman wrote:
Thu, 2. Dec 21, 19:23
I've never had that happen in any Steam game...and I own a LOT of Steam games. So is that specific to x4?
This is a general cloud problem. If the application crashes when uploading data, the upload is broken. Because X4 has quite large savegames, the chance is just higher that it happens. But it can happen with any game. Therefore, always disable the cloud if you do not really need it. You can do this globally in Steam in the options under Cloud. You don't have to do it for each game individually, but you can.

svarni
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by svarni » Sat, 25. Dec 21, 16:28

I just lost all my savegames due to this bug. The game crashed propably because of an old GPU driver. Now all my saves are just containing zeroes, I verified that using HxD (free hex editor for windows) because I couldn't decompress the .gz savegames using 7-zip. https://ibb.co/64MTGqt
This is so frustrating even after the few hours I spent in the game. I'll now disable steam cloud. Question is: what would have been the correct behaviour when the warning from steam cloud appeared? Just wait a few minutes?

-- EDIT --
I recovered my lost saves using a hint from here: https://www.howtogeek.com/428491/how-to ... eam-cloud/

There is a description on how to download the saves from cloud. My faulty ones seem to not have been written back to the cloud. Lucky me!

-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by -=SiR KiLLaLoT=- » Sat, 25. Dec 21, 17:13

The problem of X4 cloud saves occurs due to the size of the saves themselves, especially if you don't use internal compression.
In the case of "compressed" saves (size 100mb for example), if they have all been overwritten during gameplay, you will have to send 1GB and 1.5GB of data to the cloud.
In the case of uncompressed files, these numbers must be multiplied x10 and as you can already imagine, to send 10 GB, it would take a lifetime.
Unfortunately the sending connection speed sucks and to send a similar amount of data (compressed) you will have to wait at least 2-3 minutes.
If in the meantime you try to forcibly shut down steam because it "seems stuck", you are doing a lot of damage. The sending of the save would be suddenly blocked and you will find the data sent in half.
When this happens you have to pay attention to the options that steam offers you when starting the game again.
It will notify you that there is a conflict between the saves present on the PC and those present in the cloud and through this you can again decide what to send to the cloud.

I recommend that you leave the option active, activate the compression of the saves within the game and every time you finish a game session wait for steam to synchronize all the saves.
You will notice that the title entry of X4 will remain blue/light blue for the entire time of the upload. When it turns white you can start the game again or quit steam.
I had a bad experience with an M.2 SSD that suddenly died with a loss of 10 days of play, so in my experience I recommend not to disable that option, but simply understand how it works and adapt accordingly.
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alt3rn1ty
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by alt3rn1ty » Sat, 25. Dec 21, 20:04

Dont know if its relevant or not, but by default Windows OneDrive is also backing up your documents (which includes X4 saves), aswell as Steam by default (so its a bit of an unnecessary duplicated effort backing up the same files to different servers with different processes). Every man and his dog wants to push "free" background running processes giving cloud services at us these days, along with everyone wanting to provide overlays (Steam, NVidia) .. nightmare of potential conflicts / complications stepping on each others toes :)

Personally I dont use any, bought a cheap small usb Hard drive, plug it in once a week, copy and paste my documents folder onto it, backup done, if I need to restore just reverse the process .. and the game is free to run without any extra complications running in the background. :xenon:
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SSD - Kioxia M.2 NVME 512gb (System), + Samsung M.2 NVME 970 Evo Plus 1tb (Games)

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KextV8
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Re: Is it better to disable steam cloud

Post by KextV8 » Mon, 27. Dec 21, 05:07

Depends on your needs. If you play one only one computer then feel free.

I play on multiple computers and GeForce now. Turning it off isn't an option for me.

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