I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.

  • itchychipsEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    There are so many places that games decide to put their save files on Windows.

    I’ve got save directories in:

    • %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\Saved Games (only Elite Dangerous)
    • Documents (Mass Effect Andromeda, X4: Foundations, EVE Online, GreedFall, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, SteamVR)
    • Documents\My Games
    • %APPDATA%
    • %LOCALAPPDATA%
    • %APPDATA%..\LocalLow (does not seem to have an environment variable defined for this one)
    • Various game install directories

    There’s probably other places. Not sure how much the registry is used for saves, either, but that would complicate backups more than they already are.

    I’d love if they just unify save and config data for games to %APPDATA%. Documents should never be touched by software without the user’s explicit consent, though, and because of the situation, the Documents directory is the last place I ever put actual documents.