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It's senseless to store files that don't have user-facing meaning in My Documents. I know games that use it varyingly for web caches, shader caches, binary conf
by SpaceManiac 8y ago
It's senseless to store files that don't have user-facing meaning in My Documents. I know games that use it varyingly for web caches, shader caches, binary config files, debug logs, Lua scripts, downloaded mods, and even executables. And while arguably most gamers understand what save files are, they can't be double-clicked to open them, so I don't consider them documents (Maybe this is pedantic).
All this kind of stuff is what Appdata\Roaming and Appdata\Local are supposed to be for.
- Dayshine 8y agoSave games is a poor example. Users often need to back them up. Backup systems often include Documents by default but not AppData. Files in AppData are hidden, and you would not expect users to find them. Further, many save games can be opened with a text editor just fine :)
- wongarsu 8y agoI understand not backing up AppData/Local, but everything in AppData/Roaming is supposedly important enough to sync it over the network (if you use domains or another mechanism to give you the same Windows account on multiple computers). Any default policy which doesn't back up AppData/Roaming seems ill advised.
- user5994461 8y agoIt's ill advised to synchronize game saves by default. Quite a few popular games generate gigabytes of saves. My witcher saves were 10GB, until I realize that problem and deleted them, no wounder backups were slow. Skyrim is not that far off. Pretty sure backup is already integrated in steam for these two games.
- h1d 8y agoI don't know what they save but 10GB is surely not purely saved games. It's those games fault not about 'saving saved games by default'.
- zingmars 8y agoNope, Witcher 1 saves are just really large (for some reason in addition to all the flags they also contain some locale data and such). 10GiB is actually pretty reasonable for a Witcher playthrough.
- user5994461 8y agoIt's similar in the Witcher 2, 3 and Skyrim. The saves start small and they grow to 10MB as you progress in the game. I guess there is a lot of world state and items to hold in an RPG. Count a few hundred saves, manual or autosave and that's a lot of space. In the witcher 1 there is also an uncompressed BMP thumbnail with each save that is about a megabyte. It's PNG compressed in the witcher 2. They learned from their mistake.
- Dayshine 8y agoMy "Roaming" is 12GB. I don't think Chrome and Firefox listen to that advice.
- wongarsu 8y agoMy AppData/Local is 14GB, mostly caches from Chrome, Firefox and Spotify. My AppData/Roaming is 3.3GB, mostly my emails (with my Browser's localstorage a distant second). Chrome's cache is in AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data and Firefox's cache is in AppData/Local/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/. The only big offender on my system is npm with a cache in AppData/Roaming/npm-cache
- ygra 8y agoThunderbird infamously places the local copy of IMAP mails (i.e. Effectively a cache) into Appdata\Roaming. It's the single largest directory I have there. Everything else is quite reasonable in size.
- ChrisSD 8y agoAs noted below there's a special folder called "Saved Games" that's specifically meant for this purpose. A lot of games still don't use it.
- runxel 8y agoAnd here I am, still wanting my save files to reside next to the games exe...
- ChrisSD 8y agoFair enough but on multi-user systems you can surely see the value in separate save game folders?
- chii 8y agowhen was the last time a gaming machine is a multi-user system?!
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoThere's no reason there couldn't be separate per-user folders within the game's installation path for that.
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoDo you also store your birth certificate in your car's glovebox?
- jamiepenney 8y agoI haven't used My Documents for documents for years now. The directory is useless because of all the cruft, I store useful things elsewhere now.
- h1d 8y agoMy Documents meant as /var/tmp to me ever since it existed. Never put my own files there.