Saved Game Backup Solutions

I may not have to build my own after all. I came across two promising little open source programs that offer slightly different takes on backing up your saved games.

MASGAU offers the ability to backup the saved games of a number of titles either manually or automatically through a background monitor or scheduling app. While the variety of titles is indeed generous and includes support for both Disc and Steam-based installs, the updates for newer titles is slow. Intrepid individuals who have some file system knowledge can submit information to the creator as well as manually add support via XML files that the program will load automatically and use. Coupled with DropBox, you can have access to your saved games anywhere. With the addition of portability and manually entering paths for the submission app, this is a definite winner.

SaveGame Backup Manager is not as robust, there is no predefined game detection nor is there compression support, all settings have to be entered manually. It does however have a very interesting feature: Backup and Restore via hotkey. Each press of the key will incrementally backup your saved game folder allowing for a virtually unlimited amount of save games. Best of all, those games that punish you for failing by resetting your position or adding a failure count can be avoided by hotkey restoring your latest save and then reloading that saved game.