On a gaming PC, the games themselves are easy to replace: your launchers will download them again. What you cannot download are your saves for games without cloud sync, your mods and settings, screenshots and recordings, and everything else on the PC. A good backup plan focuses on those.
Game saves: check cloud sync first
Steam Cloud, Epic, GOG Galaxy, Xbox and most other launchers sync saves automatically for games that support it. On Steam, the store page shows “Steam Cloud” when a game supports it, and the setting can be checked in the game’s properties.
Not every game does, though, and some older or modded games store saves locally only. Common locations are:
Documents\My GamesorDocuments\[Game name]%APPDATA%and%LOCALAPPDATA%(paste these into File Explorer’s address bar)Saved Gamesin your user folder- The game’s own install folder
PCGamingWiki lists the exact save location for most games. Free tools such as Ludusavi can find and back up saves for hundreds of games automatically.
Mods and settings
Heavily modded games (Skyrim, Minecraft, Stardew Valley and others) can take hours to set up again. Back up the mod manager’s profile folder and your mod list. Configuration files, controller layouts and keybinds are worth saving too.
Back up the whole PC
For your documents, photos and everything else, use one of these:
- File History or Windows Backup, built into Windows, to copy your user folders to an external drive or OneDrive.
- System image software, which copies the entire drive so you can restore the PC exactly as it was after a drive failure.
- Cloud backup services, which keep a copy off-site automatically.
The 3-2-1 rule
A widely recommended approach is to keep three copies of important data, on two different types of storage, with one copy off-site. For a gaming PC, that could mean the files on your PC, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in a cloud service. An external drive kept next to the PC will not help in case of theft, fire or a power surge.
Test it
A backup that has never been restored is a guess. Once in a while, open your backup and restore a save file or a folder to check that it works. And before major changes, such as a Windows reinstall, a new drive or a BIOS update, make an extra backup first.
