Cloud Saves GRRRRRR!!!!

[Jez_Gafys]

I ask everyone to stop using this feature!! I play my games across 4 devices so thought cloud saves would be cool. I could play on my phone, save then play on my shield or PC and resume. Sometimes it works great. I am now though sick and bloody tired of save games being overwrote with older version sometimes loosing hours or days worth or play time. Like for example I might have played a game once on my PC, then resume on my phone for a week or so, then load it on my PC and instead of the PC loading the save from the "cloud" is bloody upload and overwrites loosing the entire save! If you do use it, make sure you have an option to restore older versions of files, google drive offers this, as you will be using it frequently.

[criezy]

That sounds like a serious flaw in the design of the cloud save sync. Creating a bug report for this on https://bugs.scummvm.org/ would be great so that this will hopefully get fixed.

[Praetorian]

I do remember encountering one or two issues with Cloud Saves a few months ago, while I was testing it for the Android port. I fixed the few blocking ones for the release of the port (there were a couple with the LAN file server feature too).

But I didn't do any follow up extensive testing, due to time constraints and kind of left it to users to report the issues in their feedback.

I'd say the feature is relative new and we need the bug reports to polish it up.

I will report the issues I've seen, if/when I get the time to reproduce them.

[sev]

The cloud saves sync code keeps a list of files in a file called "timestamps". Then loads it and compares. The reason for keeping it in a separate file is that not all cloud providers track the file timestamps. Thus, ScummVM queries your device date/time and stores it in the file. Then, on the load in case the timestamp of an in-cloud file is newer, it overrides the local file.

That's it in essence. For tracking the problem down, we would need the copies of the 'timestamps' file together with the visual snapshot of the directories.

That also means that if your device does not provide correct time for whatever reason, this scheme will not work.

Of course, the alternative (or additional) solution would be to display dialog when there is a planned overwrite. Maybe the dialog will have something like "Overwrite/Keep/Rename and keep both". However, there could be a problem with the third option, because some engines keep saves in 2 files: individual saves and their "catalog" with additional metainfo.

@Praetorian, there is some test code in the testbed engine, but it does not check for timestamps as a separate test.


Eugene

[Jez_Gafys]

Yesterday was my final straw, put me off playing the game again. Was playing Simon the Sorcerer on my PC, for several hours, saved the game, went back and was fine. That same evening I was lying in bed and decided to play some more on my phone, and it was an old save. Went to load it on the PC and it sync'd with the cloud and again an old save so lost it all.

I have also noticed randomly the saves folder on google is store the full game, this only seems to happen with Simon the sorcerer, it uploads the entire game into the save directory. The issue though with same games, is accross all games, tried T7G, Monkey Island and fotaq. What makes it worse is that when you launch scumm it does a sync and overwrites the local save game so you don't even get a chance to back it up.


When I first tried cloud sync it was the perfect solution. Because Android scumm can't write to nas drives I needed a central location. I tested cloud saves and it worked, but as I used it more I just started to notice the inconsistences. It's worse on games were you can load a save game from the scumm interface, like ones were you have to launch it first then load a save.