PSA: Back Up Your Dark Souls: Remastered PC Save

You know what would really suck? Playing a bunch of Dark Souls: Remastered and then losing all your progress due to a corrupted save.

As you play Dark Souls, the game is constantly saving. Your save is tied to your progress and equipment, of course. It’s also tied more invisibly to your reputation in the game’s online ecosystem. Unfortunately, there are a number of ways that your save can get corrupted on PC, and if that happens, you could lose everything and have to start over. Since the remastered version came out, players have been reporting issues with corrupted saves stemming from software conflicts and other more nebulous causes, and at least one infamous hacker is up to his old tricks, invading players’ games, wreaking havoc and possibly getting them banned.

The most recent instance of corrupted saves stems from a conflict the game is having with anti-virus software and cloud-syncing software. In a new post on the Dark Souls: Remastered Steam forums, one of the game’s community managers wrote that “some popular anti-virus software may damage Dark Souls: Remastered save files, or treat those files as if they were corrupted.” They wrote that cloud sync services could also mark the save file as “in use” and inaccessible, which might make the game think they’re corrupted. “In both cases,” they wrote, “if you run into this problem, please take a moment to exclude your save files from being managed by your sync services and/or your anti-virus software.”

If you’re running into that problem, hopefully their solution works. However, here’s some more general advice: Back up your Dark Souls PC save! It’s not hard to do, and it’ll let you go adventuring secure in the knowledge that even if the worst comes to pass, you’ll be able to roll back to an old save instead of losing everything.

The easiest way to do it is manually: go to C:UsersYourName DocumentsNBGIDark Souls Remastered and copy your save file folder to an alternate location. Do that every time you play, or at least every time you want to back up. Some industrious players have come up with scripts that automatically back up your save; this auto-save utility is a popular one. (These issues really only affect PC players, but of course, if you’re playing on PS4 or Xbox One, it can’t hurt to back your save up on a USB stick or to the cloud.) But however you do it, do it! You’ve probably made a lot of progress in the game at this point, and it would be a real shame to lose it all.

It’s a bummer how many technical issues the PC remaster of Dark Souls has had. I stopped playing the game for more than a week because of a now-fixed bug that blocked in-game messages, and I usually have some issues getting the game to play nice with my monitor at its default refresh rate. I would’ve hoped for more from a remaster, particularly given that it’s sold as a separate (albeit discounted) product to people who already own Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC. Dark Souls is still a fantastic game, of course, and that makes up for a lot of problems. Cold comfort to anyone who loses their progress and has to start all over again.