Checkpoint64 works from a catalog. We look up where a game keeps its saves, the app resolves that path on your machine, and from then on your farm or your world or your memory card gets versioned in the background without you thinking about it. When your game is in the catalog, there is nothing to configure. That's the whole point.
The trouble is that every catalog has an edge, and two very ordinary things put you over it.
The first is that your game isn't in it. Not an obscure game, necessarily — just one we haven't got to yet, or an itch.io release, or something with four hundred players who all love it. The second is subtler and more annoying: the game is in the catalog, but your copy isn't where the catalog says it is. Portable install. Second drive. A launcher that moved the folder out from under everybody.
Both of those end the same way — the tool shrugs, and the save nobody is backing up is precisely the save you were most worried about. This build closes both.
Point a game at your own folder
Open any game on the Add screen and there's now a Change folder button next to the detected path. Point it wherever your saves actually live, and that's the folder Checkpoint64 watches from then on. Use default puts it back.
The part worth explaining is what happens on your other machine. Your chosen
folder is stored against your account, not the PC you set it on — so it follows
you to the laptop. But a D:\Games\... path you set on a desktop is meaningless
on a laptop with no D: drive, and a tool that goes looking for it, finds
nothing, and stops there would be backing up exactly zero bytes while looking
perfectly healthy.
So your folder goes to the front of the list rather than replacing it. If it's there, it wins. If it isn't, the app carries on down to the normal locations and finds the copy that does exist. You get the override where it applies and the catalog everywhere else, without having to remember which machine you're sitting at.
Add a game we've never heard of
The bigger one. Add your own on the Add screen takes a game name and a save folder, and that is the entire form. No request, no waiting for us to add it, no checking back next month.
From there it's a game like any other. Auto-backup watches the folder. Every change becomes a version you can look inside and roll back to. Restores still snapshot your current save before writing over it, so rolling back is itself reversible — the same rule as everywhere else. The engine never cared what the game was called; it only ever needed a folder.
Two honest notes. Games you add are yours alone — nobody else sees them, which is the point, but it also means they live in your personal library rather than a team. Your teammates have no way to find a folder only you named, so shared libraries still work from the catalog. And to keep a long shelf navigable, the Add screen now filters by OFFICIAL, YOURS, and DETECTED — ours, yours, and the ones already found installed on this machine.
If you add something good, tell us. Games people add themselves are the best possible list of what to put in the catalog next, and several already have.
28 Ubisoft Connect games
Speaking of which. Ubisoft buries its saves two layers of numbers deep — a folder named for your Ubisoft account, and inside that a folder named for the game — and neither number is one anybody can write down in advance. That's why these have been missing. This build teaches the app to walk that structure, trying each account folder it finds until one turns up the game's saves, and maps the per-game number for 28 titles:
The Assassin's Creed line — Valhalla, Odyssey, Origins, Mirage, Shadows, Black Flag, Unity, Syndicate — plus Far Cry 3, 4, 5, 6, Primal and New Dawn, Watch Dogs 1, 2 and Legion, Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint, Rainbow Six Siege, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Star Wars Outlaws, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Immortals Fenyx Rising, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Riders Republic, The Crew 2, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.
Sign in to Ubisoft Connect and launch the game once so the folder exists, then add it like anything else. One limitation to be straight about: these are Windows only. The account folder sits inside Ubisoft's own launcher data, and there's no way to work out which one is yours from inside a Proton prefix — so they don't resolve on the Steam Deck. The Crew 2 and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown never used that folder in the first place, and do work there.
The catalog's save locations are all written up at /saves/, if you just want to know where a game keeps your files.
If Steam is your only way in
Separate from all of that, and worth two minutes if it applies to you.
If you signed in with Steam, Steam has been the only route to your account — and therefore the only route to your saves. That's fine right up until it isn't: a lost password, a hijacked account, a support queue you're stuck in for a week.
Settings → Account recovery now takes an email address. Confirm it, and optionally set a password, and you have a second way in that doesn't depend on Steam. Nothing changes on your account until you click the link in that email.
On the free plan, confirming the address also earns you +10 MiB of storage on top of the 20 MiB you start with — half again as much space, for adding the thing that stops you losing the account. If you're on a paid plan you already have room to spare, so it sits dormant.
Also in this build
- Refresh data, in Settings, for when something on screen looks stale and you'd rather not restart the app.
- The tray menu links to checkpoint64.com, so the download page and the guides are one click from the tray icon.
Download Checkpoint64 or grab it on Steam — it's free, and it'll now version a game we've never heard of.