Why you shouldn’t rely on Steam Cloud

Steam Cloud syncs your save games to Steam servers, and I relied on this feature and reinstalled Windows. Too bad for me! A lot of recent saves were lost, and I was stuck with an old save.

So, I contacted support, and found out that Valve doesn’t believe Steam Cloud to be a reliable service. Here’s a message I’ve got from support:

As stated, your cloud looks normal from our end so we would need the logs on your system to investigate the issue further. However, since you recently reinstalled Windows any relevant logs local to your system have likely been lost as well.

In the future, I recommend backing up your saved games to an external drive before reformatting your operating system to prevent losing any saved data.

If you'd like to learn more about Steam Cloud, please see our Steam Cloud FAQ.

I'm sorry we can't be of more help with this specific issue.

As you can see, Valve recommends you not to rely on Steam Cloud for your saves.

And it doesn’t care about edge cases like mine. Steam has no logs to look at to diagnose the problem I’ve had, which means, it won’t be fixed, and you might be next hit by it.

Of course, it’d be hard to diagnose by only looking at server-side logs, but it could give some information at least. Like client version, etc. And maybe several users reporting problems would have something in common.

I feel that Valve just doesn’t care about that. It’s no big deal for them if your saves get lots, it’s business as usual.