Sharing your saves with the Online Database

Introduction

The online save database project is part of Apollo Save Tool for the PlayStation 3.

Exporting a save

To start, I'll assume you already have the latest version of Apollo installed. You'll also need a USB drive (FAT32) connected to your PS3 to save the exported .zip file.

Steps:

Within the app, browse your HDD/USB saves
Select the save-game you want to export
From the options, select Export save game to Zip
Next, select to which USB port you want to save (USB 0 or 1).
Wait for the .zip export file to be generated.

If everything went well, you'll have the exported .zip file ready on your USB storage device here: /PS3/EXPORT/XXXXXXXX.zip

In the EXPORT folder you'll also find a saves.txt file, listing all exported .zips with their Title-IDs and the save-game names.

Uploading a save

To upload the zipped save file and share it with the community:

The simple way is to create a GitHub issue with the provided template, then you can write down the save description and upload the Zip file directly there (just drag&drop the .zip): https://github.com/bucanero/apollo-saves/issues/new/choose

Alternative

If you don't know about GitHub (forks, pull requests, etc.), don't worry. Just upload the .zip file you created to Mediafire or any other file-sharing service, then just send me a message here with the link and information/description so I can add it.

Advanced

Database structure

The database structure is simple:

Each game has a folder, named with the TITLE-ID. (e.g. BLUS12345)
game saves are stored in .zip files inside the game's TITLE ID folder.
The Zip filename must be XXXXXXXX.zip, where X can be a number from 0 to 9. (.zip extension lowercase).
The Zip file must contain the save-game folder and data. (e.g. MYGAME-DATA/*)
Each folder has a saves.txt file that lists the available saves, with the description.
On the root, a file games.txt lists all the games/title-id's available.

Note: if the explanation is a bit confusing, please browse the database and it should be self-explanatory.

Exporting a save manually

To start, I'll assume you already have your saves copied to your computer (if not, just try to copy the files with the XMB browser to USB, or download it via FTP). I'll do an example with a Yakuza 4 save (BLES01081)

once I have my save copied to USB, I should have a folder: \PS3\SAVEDATA\BLES01081L03

I need to create a .zip file, with only the BLES01081L03/ folder inside. (don't use the full path) For this example, I'll use 12345678.zip as the filename.

There are many ways to create a zip file, on Windows you can use a tool like WinZip, 7-zip, WinRar, etc. As an example, a command line way using Info-Zip:

zip -r 12345678.zip BLES01081L03/

If I check the compressed 12345678.zip file, I would see something like:

unzip -t 12345678.zip 
Archive:  12345678.zip
    testing: BLES01081L03/            OK
    testing: BLES01081L03/USER01      OK
    testing: BLES01081L03/PARAM.PFD   OK
    testing: BLES01081L03/ICON0.PNG   OK
    testing: BLES01081L03/PIC1.PNG    OK
    testing: BLES01081L03/PARAM.SFO   OK
No errors detected in compressed data of 12345678.zip.

Uploading a save by pull request

If you're an advanced GitHub user, you can also:

Fork the project https://github.com/bucanero/apollo-saves
Add the 12345678.zip to the BLES00000 folder
Edit saves.txt in the folder, adding 12345678.zip with a short description
Submit the changes with a Pull Request
Then I'll merge the changes and the saves will be available to every user.

License

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

For more information, please refer to the Unlicense.

Nacheras/apollo-saves