Putting Saved Games on a NAS Server

[ZLoth 10]

I'm hoping I'm not the only one here, but does anyone else move the save game directories to the NAS drive, and then set up a symbolic link pointing to them? I've been doing this for quite a while thanks to the first Witcher game having sizable save files, and my NAS server has more space available than my SSD drive. 

[Aemony 142]

I haven't done so myself since I, sorta, instead just threw more space at the issue. And my saves in general tend to be on the lower side of things (the total amount that is taken up by all of my saves is a measly 20 GB or so).

A couple of years back during Black Friday I sorta went out and bought a bunch of 1 TB SATA SSDs to throw into my desktop and since then I have yet to completely fill them out entirely -- in parts because I store other static data (software, game installers, etc) on my actual NAS.

Using symbolic links to store save files on a NAS is a good idea though, although I guess there's a risk that some games can't properly resolve the symbolic link and might crash on it instead.

[Andytizer 269]

GameSave Manager is a good tool for automating symlinks. I've done this before symlinking save paths to a cloud service like Dropbox - you could easily set this up to work on a NAS. I've always found things went wrong though (conflicts, game not detecting symlink correctly etc), so I'm not sure it's a long-term solution. If your connection to NAS dropped in the middle of the game and it stopped saving properly, I'd be very annoyed! Better to use a cheap local drive in my opinion, storage is so cheap these days.

[Aemony 142]

On that note, I guess OneDrive's feature Files On-Demand could also possibly be really useful to save local storage space by only syncing actual relevant files locally.

I'm not sure how it would affect games (possibly longer load times when dealing with a save file not read yet) but it would sure be interested if it worked flawlessly.

[ZLoth 10]

With the exception of 3DMark (it can't handle network storage, not even if you move the My Documents folder to a network drive), it has been working out pretty flawlessly for me. I haven't noticed any performance hit, but then again, most save game files are small. I also have configured my system so that recordings and screenshots go to the NAS drive as well.