Screenshot: Jake Peterson
Elden Ring is a massive game. You can spend hours exploring the map, engaging with enemies, and progressing through the storyline, all without giving a second thought to your save file. After all, Steam automatically backs up your save files to the cloud. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, a lot. Save file corruption is a thing, and some Elden Ring players have lost their progress to it. If you want to prevent your game file from facing a similar fate, consider manually backing up your game file.
You don’t need to do a bunch of technical setup to get the job done, either: Just use a simple mod like Mort65's “Simple Timed Backup.” This mod makes it easy to set backup intervals for your Elden Ring game file, so you always know you have a local backup on your PC should anything go awry with Steam. Not only is it a viable system for restoring your game due to corruption, it can serve as a makeshift save state. Don’t like how the last 10 minutes of your game played out? Just restore from your local backup.
Installing the mod itself is simple, but requires a few slightly obnoxious steps to get started. You’ll find the mod at Mort65's Nexus Mods page. In order to download the mod from this site, you’ll need to create an account, which you can do by clicking REGISTER in the top-right corner of the screen. Don’t be fooled, though: Once you successfully set your username and password, the site will try to make you think you need to pay for said account. You don’t. Just click the X on this page to exit out, then return to the original mod page.
From here, you can click the “Manual” download option. You’ll see a warning here letting you know the mod requires the app “AutoHotkey” in order to run properly. If you already have that app, great! If not, download it from AutoHotkey’s official site. Once the app is on your computer, you can go grab the mod.
Once your mod is on your computer, locate it and open the “Simple Timed Backup” file. Now, choose the time interval at which you’d like the mod to save backups. By default, it makes a backup every 10 minutes, but if you feel you’ll need longer or shorter intervals, you can easily change that. You can also change the number of backups the mod will make until it starts overwriting old ones. Again, the default is 10, but you can change it to whatever you want, or choose “Unlimited” to never overwrite past backups. Once you’re happy with your settings, click “Activate” and the mod will start doing its thing.
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Alternatively, you can use this mod to take manual backups instead of timed ones. I think this works great for save states: If you know you’re heading into a tough fight and you’ll likely want to restore your game in the immediate future, choosing “Back up...” to make an instant backup is a great solution.
To restore from your backups in the future, first return to the Elden Ring title screen. Then, head back to the Simple Timed Backup app, choose “Restore,” then choose the backup you want to restore from. (Most likely, the save you want to restore from will be the most recent file here.)
