Factorio Forums

Today I figured out that Factorio synchronizes saves over Steam.

What I also learnt was that if there already are saves with same name (autosaves) then they will be overwritten by whatever steam version gets launched last with no warning.

So, my scenario was that I installed Steam to my Linux partition and I thought I copied over the saves/mods dir from Windows. I messed up a little and instead copied over saves from an ancient version of factorio somehow (earliest autosave was dated to January 2014 ). I noticed that in-game when it warned about the saves being made by incompatible version. I also saw that for whatever reason, I couldn't get access to my real factorio folder in my windows drive to copy over the real saves. I rebooted back to windows, launched factorio and lo and behold - I was greeted with same ancient saves there as well. The ones I wanted were silently uploaded by the Linux version of Steam and they overwrote what was already there.


I know I can disable cloud sync completely but I was wondering if it was somehow possible to check if existing saves with same name are newer/older/different and allow the user to pick if they want to upload/overwrite them.

Steam will warn you if you play offline and have newer data than in the cloud. I'm surprised it didn't warn you that the local data was newer than the cloud data at startup? Or maybe it assumed that because you modified it locally after syncing that you wanted that data to upload.

I'm not sure that the app can selectively sync data like you're asking it to. I'm pretty sure that it just reads and writes the data as if it was local, and Steam handles the cloud syncing automatically.

TheSkiGeek wrote:Steam will warn you if you play offline and have newer data than in the cloud.

I didn't really play offline in Linux. I just copied over the mods/saves directory from some ancient install to Linux and attempted to run it. Factorio itself didn't really start up under Linux as mods were using old naming convention that prevented the game to run. I think that Steam itself uploaded the saves to cloud without factorio getting in the way.

TheSkiGeek wrote:I'm surprised it didn't warn you that the local data was newer than the cloud data at startup?

Yea, I didn't get any warnings.

TheSkiGeek wrote: Or maybe it assumed that because you modified it locally after syncing that you wanted that data to upload.

I'm not really sure how did Steam figure out what saves to upload and what not to.

Going by last modification dates, the saves I copied under Linux were over 2 years old (file timestamps didn't change during file copy). If steam was using those dates at all, it should have been obvious to not to upload them to cloud.

TheSkiGeek wrote:I'm not sure that the app can selectively sync data like you're asking it to. I'm pretty sure that it just reads and writes the data as if it was local, and Steam handles the cloud syncing automatically.

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. If Steam is doing all that management on it's own without games having any say in the matter, I should got to steam with the issue.


Just to be sure, I'm not at all angry/disappointed/whatever in factorio or its devs about what happened. It was my own careless mistake and in the end, I didn't really loose all that much. I'm just trying to figure out how that system works and if there might be something that can be done by devs to make it a bit better.

Hm. You can try to create a bug-report referring to this topic. I think it's devs job to have a look over this to decide if this is a bug or not, cause it is at the borders of the game.