From a fresh install to syncing saves.

1.What OpenSave actually does

You play a game on your desktop. Later you want to carry on from your laptop, or your Steam Deck. Unless the game supports Steam Cloud, your progress does not follow you — the save is a folder of files sitting on one machine.

OpenSave watches those folders. When a save changes, it does two things: it keeps a copy of how the folder looked, so you can go back to it, and it sends the change to your other devices, so they have the same save. Only the parts of the file that changed are sent, so it stays quick even on a large save.

Two things it deliberately does not do:

• There is no account and no server. Your devices talk to each other directly. Nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you switch on cloud backup yourself.
• It never overwrites without being sure. If two devices changed the same save independently, it stops and asks you rather than picking one.

It works for any game whose save is a folder or a file on disk — bought anywhere, or installed from outside a store entirely. It handles emulators too.

2.Installing it

Download the latest build from the releases page.

Windows — download OpenSave.exe and run it. There is no installer and nothing goes in the registry.

Linux — download the tarball, extract it, and run ./OpenSave. There is also a .deb, an .rpm and a Flatpak.

Do this on each device you want to sync. They all need the app.

3.First run: finding your saves

Open OpenSave. Your library is empty. There are two ways to fill it.

1. Auto-scan — start here

   Click 🔍 Auto-scan. OpenSave looks in all the usual places — Steam libraries, Proton and Wine prefixes, emulator folders, the Windows locations games conventionally use — and checks them against a community-maintained list of save paths covering tens of thousands of titles. It takes a few seconds.

2. Or track a folder yourself

   If a game is not found, click + Track folder and point OpenSave at the folder (or single file) the game saves into. This always works; auto-scan is only a convenience.

   Not sure where a game saves? PCGamingWiki lists save paths for most games — search the title and look for "Save game data location".

4.Reading the scan results

This is the screen where most of the confusion happens, so it is worth understanding. Every tile is one game, and underneath it says what the folder holds:

That last part is the useful bit. A game is often found in three or four different places — the Steam folder, wherever your launcher put it, and one left behind by an install you have moved on from. They all look equally plausible. The date tells you which one you are actually playing.

"found in 3 folders"

When a game turns up in more than one place, its tile says found in 3 folders. Click that and you get the list, each folder labelled:

The Track button does whatever is ticked. If two folders are one save, it says Track all 2 and creates one game with both. If OpenSave gets it wrong — you know the old-looking folder is the one you play — open the list and tick the one you want instead.

Empty folders are hidden

Steam creates a save folder for every game you own whether or not saves go there, so a real scan is full of folders with nothing in them. Those are hidden; on a typical library that is about a fifth of the results. The toolbar says Show 48 empty if you want them — useful if you want to track a game before playing it for the first time.

Tracking several games at once

Click tiles to select them, then Track selected. If OpenSave listed two folders separately that you know are one game, tick both and use Track as one game instead.

5.Adding your second device

Install and open OpenSave on the other machine too, then pick whichever situation matches.

Both on the same network

1. Open Devices on both

   They find each other automatically and appear in the list.

2. Click Pair on one

   Then approve the request on the other. Pairing is mutual on purpose — nobody can connect to your machine without you saying yes on that machine.

If they do not see each other, your network is probably set to Public, which blocks local discovery. Set it to Private on Windows, allow OpenSave through the firewall, or skip discovery entirely: under Devices → Add by IP address, type the other machine's local address (something like 192.168.1.42) and port 8383, then Send pairing request.

Different networks

Open Internet Sync on the first device and generate a room code. Enter the same code on the second device. They find each other through a relay — no port forwarding, no router settings. The relay forwards traffic and stores nothing; no copy of your saves is written to it.

The connection to the relay is encrypted, but that encryption ends at the relay rather than at your other device — so whoever runs the relay is someone you are trusting with the save data passing through it. For the public relay, that is us. If you would rather it were nobody, run your own.

Once paired, tracked games sync automatically. Both devices need to be tracking the same game for it to sync. If a game is named differently on each machine, OpenSave can usually match them by Steam App ID, or you can link them by hand.

6.What happens while you play

Nothing you have to think about. Concretely:

• The moment the game writes a save, OpenSave notices.
• It takes a snapshot — a copy of that moment you can return to.
• It sends the change to every paired device that is online and tracking that game.
• Only the parts of the file that changed are sent, not the whole save.

If the other device is off, the change waits and syncs when it comes back.

7.Getting an old save back

Open a game from the sidebar. The Snapshots tab lists every version, newest first.

• Restore — put the whole save back to how it was at that point.
• Browse files — look inside a snapshot and restore one file out of it, leaving everything else alone.
• Snapshot now — take one deliberately, with a comment, before you try something risky.

How many are kept

Two separate allowances, so a game that autosaves constantly cannot push out a snapshot you took on purpose.

• Automatic snapshots — taken as the game saves. The newest 20 per branch are kept by default.
• Manual snapshots — the ones you took yourself. Kept forever by default.

8.Branches: two playthroughs at once

A branch is a separate line of saves for the same game. Use one to start New Game+ without losing your finished playthrough, or to try a decision and back out of it.

When you create a branch you choose what it starts from:

• Your current save (the default) — switching to it changes nothing until you play. Safe.
• Empty — for a genuinely fresh run. Switching to it clears the save folder, and your old save is safe on the branch you left.

Switching branches always snapshots the current save onto the branch you are leaving first, so a switch can be undone by switching back. If that snapshot cannot be taken, nothing is changed at all.

9.When two devices disagree

If you play on your desktop and then on your laptop before the first sync finished, both have changes the other does not. OpenSave notices and stops.

It does not use timestamps to decide — clocks disagree between machines, and "newer" is not the same as "the one you want". It tracks what the two devices last agreed on, and if both have moved since, that is a conflict. You get a screen showing what differs and three choices:

• Keep mine — this device's version wins.
• Keep theirs — the other device's version wins.
• Keep both — the other version is put on a new branch so nothing is lost. Pick this if you are not sure.

Nothing is overwritten until you choose. If a game has several save folders, they are judged separately: a disagreement in your settings folder does not hold up your actual progress.

10.Games with awkward saves

A save split across several folders

Some games keep progress in one place and settings or mods in another — TrackMania keeps Scores, Tracks and Profiles as three sibling folders. Auto-scan usually spots this and offers them together. To do it by hand, open the game → Configuration → Save locations, name the extra folder and pick it. All of them then sync, snapshot and restore as one.

Removing a location never deletes anything — it only stops OpenSave covering it.

Files that shouldn't travel between machines

Some games store device-specific settings — resolution, controller bindings — in the same folder as the save. Copying those to another machine can break the game there, and you cannot narrow the folder without losing the save.

Open the game → Configuration → Files that shouldn't sync. Either click Pick from your save folder and tick the file — it lists what is actually there, marks each file syncs or won't sync, and writes the rule for you — or type patterns, one per line, like a .gitignore:

Upper and lower case do not matter. Set the same list on your other devices — each machine applies its own.

One thing to know: a pattern applies to every folder of that game, so if the same filename exists in two of its save locations it is excluded in both.

11.Running your own relay

Only relevant for syncing across the internet, and only if you would rather not use the free hosted relay. Two options, in increasing order of effort.

Host it on a PC you already own. Settings → Internet relay → tick Host a WAN relay server on this device, and pick a port. The button below shows the addresses to hand to whoever is connecting. You will need to forward that port on your router, and this machine has to be switched on for the others to find each other through it.

Put it on a server. A one-command installer handles the binary, the service, the firewall, and a certificate if you have a domain:

Then point each of your gaming devices at it and join a room. The full walkthrough is in docs/RELAY.md.

12.Every setting explained

Settings has five tabs. Most of it you will never need.

13.Things easy to miss

The same game named differently on two machines

If a title is tracked as "Elden Ring" here and "ELDEN RING" there, they will not sync — they are two games as far as OpenSave is concerned. Either rename one, or link them with opensave link <gameId> <otherGameId>. Games sharing a Steam App ID can be matched automatically with Settings → Sync → match by App ID, which is off by default so two genuinely separate copies are never merged behind your back.

Moving to a new PC

If the old machine still works, pair the two and let them sync. If it does not, use Cloud Backup → Export to write your whole library — games, settings, snapshot history — to a single portable file, and Import it on the new machine.

A few smaller ones

• Activity is the log of everything OpenSave has done. The first place to look when something did not happen and you want to know why.
• Launching games — set a game's executable in its Configuration tab and OpenSave gets a Play button.
• Untracking is safe. Removing a game never deletes a save file or a snapshot.
• Where your data lives — everything is in a .opensave folder in your home directory. Deleting it resets OpenSave completely and touches none of your actual game saves.

14.When something looks wrong

15.Glossary