cloud-savegame

Steam cloud save is kinda cool but not every possible game supports it and there is no simple way to workaround this.

This is my attempt to solve that.

This tool finds save files with logic defined as simple rules (really, look at the rules folder to see many examples) that tell where to look for the savegames. Not only savegames are supported, but basically any software state. Maybe dotfiles for some specific software?

It also has backlinking as an experimental feature, that in my tests work good enough. With a flag it creates the symlinks in the origin places so when the software writes the file it writes automatically to your saves repository. Issues may include if you move the repo to other location then the symlinks would break. A really cool side effect of this is when you download the same game in more than one app store (including the green steam) and each one creates a Wine/Proton prefix and then your saves are only available in one of the builds of the game. With this feature both games can see each other saves.

It copies the files to the output folder by game name and grouping. Ex: screenshots and mods separated from save games themselves. The ignore logic for git, if, for example there are large mods in there can be done with .gitignore files.

A configuration file is required to use the program. An example one is provided in the repo and was used to test the software.

No Windows support is planned although it should work the same way because we don't depend on specific platform stuff (pathlib is extensively used here and it's multiplatform).

This tool is in early development with the hope to be useful, at least for me. I am not responsible if your backup fails for some reason.

How to use

Install Python
- 3.10 or above is recommended
- Should work above 3.8
- Not sure if 3.5 has all the stuff it use, but should work
- Python incompatibilites should be obvios (like give you a missing import error)
Git (optional)
- If you want repo syncing this is required
Run the backup.py script using Python
- --help will give you all information you need

⚠️ Really important Information about the backlinking feature ⚠️

By default, the Steam Runtime at most allows read only access for stuff outside the protn prefix and some specific data

This means that your Steam Play/Proton game will very likely be able to read the saves but will not be able to write new saves if the canonical destination is the repository.
This can be solved by setting STEAM_COMPAT_MOUNTS in the launch options for each damn game you will use with this.
In my case, I store my saves repo at /home/lucasew/SavedGames so a launch option that I use is STEAM_COMPAT_MOUNTS=/home/lucasew/SavedGames %command%.
- (TODO: Test if setting STEAM_COMPAT_MOUNTS system wide solves this)
Related issue: ValveSoftware/steam-runtime#470

Configuration reference

The configuration follows the INI format and it's parsed by Python's native configparser.

This means:

Comments start with #.
No need to scape items, like no need to use " to define strings.
No nesting as we have in YAML, it's a map of maps of strings and that's it.
No need to install anything else, only the standard non-jurassic Python 3 is required, and Git if you want the Full Experience®.

For clarification sake, I will reference the options as section.subsection. If I say set eoq.trabson to "huehuebrbr" then it would be the following code:

[eoq]
trabson=huehuebrbr

# yay, ini supports comments

There is a simple layer of "typing" over configparser primitives.

String: the normal behaviour one can expect
List: list of strings, separated by the value of general.divider
Paths: list of paths, separated by the value of general.divider
Boolean: if the value exists then it's true, otherwise it's false. To set it to false you have to comment it out

Core sections

String general.divider: What is the divider symbol for each item in a list. It's , by default. I don't recommend changing this.
Paths search.extra_homes: Paths that you are certain that will have home directories. May speed up ingestion depending on how you finetune this.
Paths search.ignore: Paths that you don't want the program to search. I use it for fuse mounts, that will not have relevant stuff anyway and are slow to search. Finetuning this can make ingestion a hell of fast. Actually that was a game changer for my setup.
Paths search.paths: Paths to be searched for home directories.

What is a home directory in this case?

As you may have deduced, the automatic search system only looks for home directories. Our definition of home directory is a directory that has any of the items defined in the top level variable HOMEFINDER_FIND_FOLDERS. That's it. If it has any of these items then it's in. (<-- This definition may change in the future. If the code seems inconsistent with this statement then please report)

App specific sections

The name of each app is defined by the rule name. Go search your app or game in the rules folder to get the exact name.

Paths $app.installdir: Required for games, such as Flatout 2, that saves their data in the game install directory instead of some user folder.
Boolean $app.ignore_$output: In the rule of the game there is a item type, like saves, and the path with the special variables. With this flag you can avoid that item type to be touched by this tool. I use it for my Farming Simulator mods as those are goddamn fat and some of them are over the 100MB hard limit for each file in GitHub. Skyrim saves are not so small (~30MB each), but still acceptable.

Rules reference

Rules are our domain specific language to add support for new apps and games.

Windows support shouldn't be a problem as we use pathlib everywhere and it deals with Windows issues fine (such as that \ instead of / thing), but if submitting rules please have preference with the format that is already being used.

Special variables

$documents: The documents folder in a home folder. This may not catch your documents folder depending on which language you have set on your PC.
$appdata: The ~/AppData folder in a home folder. In Windows it's hidden by default.
$home: The home folder itself.
$installdir: The folder where the app is installed. All apps that use this must have installdir specified in the configuration file for the rule to work.

FAQ

Why Python?

It doesn't give me headaches, I flow very well, it's pragmatic and simple AF and not slow enough to make me angry.

And also, as I did it with only the standard library, it's easier to distribute.

BTW most of this language discussion is bs. Most of the projects not even see the sunlight to get real load so deliver quickly then optimize on demand.

I WILL NOT REWRITE THIS IN RUST.

Why this exsits?

Steam cloud is cool, works with many games but not all. And with Jack Sparrow games you are on your own ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

lucasew/cloud-savegame