Automatically store your game saves in the cloud, using SkyDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive.

I am a gamer. I own a lot of Steam games, and although some of the are Steam Cloud enabled, most of them are not. This is quite frustrating when I want to fire up a game or two during lunch while I'm at work, but then realize that I was playing that particular game at home and don't have my latest save.

If you have SkyDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive or anything similar this is in many cases easily solvable.

I'll take my recent endeavors with XCOM Enemy Unknown as an example. I bought it off Steam but unfortunately it isn't Steam Cloud enabled so my saved games don't automatically persist between my machine at home and at work where I have Steam installed. Until now :)

XCOM stores it's game saves by default under your user account profile which in my case is listed under

C:\Users\my-username\Documents\My Games\XCOM - Enemy Unknown\XComGame\SaveData

I first copied the contents of that folder to a temporary folder, opened a command prompt to

C:\Users\my-username\Documents\My Games\XCOM - Enemy Unknown\XComGame

I then proceeded to complete remove the SaveData directory and then I ran this simple command from within that directory:

mklink /d SaveData C:\Users\my-username\SkyDrive\Games\XCOM\SaveData

To explain this, the mklink command creates what's called a symbolic link. /d means that I am creating a directory link, and then we provide the link name and the target directory it should point to. That essentially means that I have mapped

C:\Users\my-username\Documents\My Games\XCOM - Enemy Unknown\XComGame\SaveData

to

C:\Users\my-username\SkyDrive\Games\XCOM\SaveData

I then copied back ym saved game files to that directory and voile, they are now instantly synced to the cloud. I the simply repeated the process on my work machine and I am now able to enjoy my "cloud enabled" XCOM game :)