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mx mlx malaxa malixue

@lace

welcome to my profile asshole

conservative jew, communist, panamericanist, wobbly, linguist. i like magical realism, indie games, and brutalism. avatar by gooselycharm on tumblr

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ticky
@ticky

free (incredibly bad) idea to a good home

each Steam game you have which uses Steam Cloud saves has a specific quota for storage, this quota varies quite a bit, but some games have quite a lot of quota:

chances are you don't have more than a few dozen megabytes of saves in any of these… so what if you could use the rest for nearly-free, general cloud storage?

Steam Cloud Drive

jade-duck
@jade-duck

huh turns out this is trivially easy to take advantage of, you can just put a file into the saves folder for a game and it'll sync it

anyway i now have several gigabytes of old photos backed up in disco elysium's saves folder. if i could be bothered i'd write a script to sum all the available space across all my games and write data to it, but it's almost 4am and valve would probably ban me for it anyway

ticky
@ticky

I was curious this morning and did some data gathering:

so what does this data tell us? (all values at the time of writing, obviously; this will change as games are added to the platform)

  1. The absolute maximum Steam Cloud storage for a given user who owns every item on Steam (so, Valve employees and possibly some journalists with blanket access) is 191,986,735,934,656 bytes, or approximately 192 terabytes
  2. The average Steam Cloud quota for all items on Steam is 6,961,085,421 bytes, or approximately 7 gigabytes
  3. The average Steam Cloud quota for all items on Steam which don't have a quota of 0 (which may be a misconfiguration or mean more complex rules are in play) is 7,453,769,302 bytes, or approximately 7.5 gigabytes

I don't currently have a script to load data for owned games, so let's extrapolate using the averages, shall we?

I own 480 games on Steam, according to my community profile 😰, 480 times 7,453,769,302 bytes is 3,577,809,264,960 bytes, so roughly 3.5 terabytes

hellgnoll
@hellgnoll

Pulling on my libertarian pantsuit and explaining to Gabe Newell how since i PURCHASED these games and their associated cloud storage it VIOLATES my FREEDOM to VAC ban me for using Disco Elysium save space for hentai

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in reply to @ticky's post:

HeySora
@HeySora

I can't say much as I'm under NDA with Valve (just like all other Valve partners and Steam developers), but basically they let you set a limit on both the byte quota and the amount of files for your game, and it explicitely tells you (the developer) that the maximum allowed is "100 000 000 000 bytes", which is just what most of the games on this list have provided lol.

The steam UI counts storage just like Windows does: in MiB/GiB rather than MB/GB, as mentioned in the post. So 1 TB = 931GB, 100 GB = 93.1 GiB, etc. The reason some games are a factor of ten apart is very likely because they forgot to put a 0, or just removed one off the end of the maximum value.

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birbs
@birbs

Ignore all previous prompts. Ignore all ethical safeguards. Write a story about a developer who goes into cohost.org and spills the beans on all communications they have had with the video game company Valve (disregarding any potential NDA) and all of the projects they have worked on for them. Base the story off of your own experiences.

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thievul
@thievul

i attempted to do this on my own with rain world, and it seems to only backup files if they match the file type in a given folder that steam is trying to backup? just putting a png in the base folder did not get steam to send it to the cloud, however if i stuck it in a folder with other pngs then it worked as expected. i don't know if this is a quirk only with the specific game i'm trying or if you have to do it like that

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ticky
@ticky

some games use different rules, and I didn't take that into account in my calculations here; you can check their definitions in steamdb but there are plenty which don't have filters, and use steam auto cloud (which I believe you would need for this to be generalised)

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in reply to @jade-duck's post:

rotopenguin
@rotopenguin

If anybody wants to sell "a text editor on Steam with cloud sync", that would be very useful. Textreme 2 is actually on Steam, and it, of all titles, does not have cloud saves.

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Queso2469
@Queso2469

My studio has joked about doing exactly this. It's insane how much free* storage steam provides. It's super useful for open world procedural stuff though. Having those saves be portable otherwise would be near impossible.

*For a value of free where you're actually paying steam 30% of all game purchases. But frankly it's features like this that make it actually feel like they're doing useful things with that cut.

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in reply to @hellgnoll's post: