A box appears. It would like you to choose between Local save and Cloud save. It offers two timestamps four minutes apart, no indication of what is inside either, and a pair of buttons of which one silently destroys several hours of your life.
Take your time. It certainly did.
What actually went wrong
Cloud saving is a synchronisation problem wearing a convenience costume. The system keeps a copy locally and a copy remotely, and after each session it reconciles the two. It works flawlessly right up until both copies change without the other finding out.
Which happens more often than you would think:
- You quit and shut down before the upload finished — an eight-second window that closes when you close the lid
- You played offline, so the local copy advanced alone
- You played on a second device before the first had synced
- The service had a hiccup at exactly the wrong moment
- The game crashed after writing locally but before uploading
Now there are two plausible histories of your playthrough, and the launcher has decided this is your problem.
Before you touch either button: make a copy
This is the whole article, really. Do not choose yet. Once you pick, the loser is usually overwritten, and the recovery options shrink to nothing.
Copy the local save folder somewhere else first — desktop is fine. Then whatever you choose, the other version still exists and the worst case is an inconvenience rather than a loss.
Where the folder lives, roughly:
- Steam:
Steam/userdata/<your-id>/<game-id>/— the numeric folder is the game - Windows, generally:
%USERPROFILE%/Documents/My Games/or%APPDATA%/or%LOCALAPPDATA%/ - macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/ - Linux / Steam Deck:
~/.local/share/, or inside the Proton prefix for Windows games - Epic, GOG, Xbox app: each has its own arrangement; searching the game's name plus "save location" is faster than guessing
Sort by modification date. The most recently written file is usually your real progress.
Working out which one is actually further along
Timestamps are the obvious signal and the least reliable one. A save written when you quit to the menu can be newer than the one from the end of the session that mattered. Two devices with disagreeing clocks can invert the order entirely.
Better signals, in order:
1. File size. In most games the save grows as the world accumulates state. A meaningfully larger file is usually the further one. Not infallible — some games compress, some pre-allocate — but a good first pass.
2. Load one and look. Almost every game shows a play-time counter, a chapter, or a location on the load screen. That is real information, unlike a timestamp. Just do not save after loading until you have decided.
3. What you actually remember. If you know you finished the boss, and one save is before it, the question answers itself.
Forcing the decision when the dialog will not let you
Sometimes the launcher keeps insisting, or picks for you. The reliable pattern:
- Back up the local folder (again: this first)
- Disable cloud sync for that specific game in its properties
- Launch, confirm which local save is correct, quit cleanly
- Re-enable cloud sync
- The local copy is now authoritative and gets pushed up
Per-game sync toggles exist precisely because this situation is common. They are the cleanest tool available and almost nobody knows they are there.
How to stop it recurring
Three habits, all boring, all effective:
- Quit to the main menu, then exit. Do not kill the process, do not close the lid. The sync happens on a clean exit and needs a few seconds.
- Watch for the sync indicator before shutting down. Steam shows a small progress dialog; it means what it says.
- On handhelds, wait before sleeping. Suspending a Deck or a Switch mid-upload is the single most reliable way to manufacture this problem.
And if a playthrough genuinely matters to you, copy the save folder occasionally. Cloud saves are a convenience feature, not a backup — they hold one version, and a corrupted file syncs just as enthusiastically as a good one.
The uncomfortable truth
This dialog is a design failure, not a user error. The system knows the play-time in each file, the chapter, the size, and the device each came from. It could show you all of that. Instead it shows two timestamps and asks a question it has better information to answer than you do.
Until that changes: copy the folder first, then choose. It takes fifteen seconds and it is the difference between an annoyance and a genuinely ruined evening.