When you add a game to Checkpoint64, you tell it which files to watch. You point it at your Stardew farm, the save your modlist writes, or the three files your emulator drops on disk — and from then on, every change to those files gets versioned automatically, quietly, in the background.
That works right up until your game writes a file you never pointed at.
Games do this all the time. You start a second farm and a whole new folder appears. A mod adds a profile. The game splits its autosave across a new file in the next patch. Pick-the-files backup has a blind spot baked into it: it only knows about the files that were there the day you set it up. Anything that shows up later is invisible to it — not backed up, not versioned, not even noticed. Right up until the day you need it.
Back up the whole folder
So we added a second way to do it. For the games where it fits, the setup wizard now offers a choice: instead of hand-picking files, back up the whole save folder. Pick that, and Checkpoint64 watches the folder itself — not a fixed list inside it. A file that appears next week gets caught exactly like the ones that were there on day one. New farm, new profile, new slot: all captured, no trip back into settings to add them by hand.
We're turning this on game by game, starting with the ones whose save folder is just saves — nothing else living in there to sweep up by accident. Stardew Valley is first. As we confirm each game's folder is clean, it gets the option too. Games that aren't enabled yet keep working exactly as before, picking files one at a time.
Without re-uploading the whole folder
Watching a folder sounds expensive. It isn't, because of how Checkpoint64 stores things in the first place: it uploads files by their contents, and a file whose contents it has already seen never uploads twice. So a whole-folder backup after a normal session doesn't re-send the folder — it sends the handful of files that actually changed and skips everything that didn't.
One honest note: watching more files means more of them count toward your storage quota. On the free plan's 20 MiB that adds up faster than tracking a single save, so it's worth knowing. But the bandwidth per backup stays small — you're paying for what changed, not for the whole folder, every time.
Restoring got safer, too
The other half of a backup is the day you actually reach for it, and we tightened two things there.
You can look inside a backup before you restore it. Every version now lists the files it contains, so you can open one up and confirm it's the save you mean before you roll anything back — instead of guessing from a timestamp and hoping past-you picked right.
Restoring takes a snapshot of your current save first. Rolling back used to overwrite whatever was on disk with the older version. Now Checkpoint64 quietly backs up the current state before it writes the old one over it. So a restore is itself reversible: change your mind, and the save you rolled back from is sitting right there at the top of the timeline, one click away. Restoring can no longer cost you the very thing you were about to replace.
That's the same rule behind everything here, and the reason a save corruption doesn't have to be the end of a run: never let the only copy be the one getting overwritten. It's the exact gap that makes cloud sync a poor stand-in for a backup — and now it's closed on the restore side too.
Also in this build
A few smaller things you'll notice the moment you open it:
- "Space" is now "Library." The place your saves live got a plainer name — your Personal library, plus a library for each team.
- Search your shelf. Type a game's name to filter a long shelf down to the one you're after.
- The game you're playing floats to the top. Launch a game and its card jumps to the front of the shelf, so the save you're about to touch is the first one you see.
- Clearer confirmations. Save actions now confirm with a quick toast, and the manual "Back up now" button has a short cooldown so an impatient double-click can't fire it twice.
Download the early build — it's free, and it'll catch the save files you didn't know to pick.