Factorio Forums

Hey there, I had a great amount of difficulty starting the game. I figured out the problem on my own, which lead to the creation of this topic.
Here's where I'm coming from:

I had two years of saves synced to the Steam cloud. At some point, I moved them to a folder called "old" to organize them, and went on my way. I played Factorio for another year, and then stopped. Then, 0.17 came out, had a few hours of fun and then stopped for the night. I saw I had a ton of saves again, so I organized my older stuff again into a folder, called "old2".

I went to play it again today and I thought the game wouldn't start! It turns out that Steam didn't like what I did and wanted to pull 250mb+ of save files from the cloud and sync it to my PC! I want Cloud saves enabled, just in case, but I don't want them micromanaging everything.

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It turns out there is no way in-game to manipulate save files, beyond creating, loading, or deleting them. Outside of the game, you can shove files in subfolders, rename them, all that sort of stuff, but you are very limited ingame, and it becomes an issue because Steam tries to babysit it. Therefore I would suggest that a better save management system be added.

If you only want to prevent the excessive cloud storage -

Take the save files you want to archive from the standard folder -
%APPDATA%\Factorio\saves\

...and move them to a new folder that is not a subdirectory. Some examples:
%APPDATA%\Factorio\save-archived\
%APPDATA%\Factorio\save-archived-0.16\
etc.

As long as the files you want aren't subdirectories under the main "saves" folder, it won't sync to the cloud.