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Your First Backup

Once SaveVault is installed, getting protected takes two steps. The first time you open the desktop app, a short setup walks you through both.

The first-run setup

Section titled “The first-run setup”

On first launch the app shows a Welcome to SaveVault window with three steps. It appears once per machine, and every way out of it (including Skip for now) marks it done.

  1. Welcome to SaveVault. SaveVault scans this PC for installed games and shows a running count. Click Get Started to continue (or Skip for now).
  2. Where should backups go? The default backup folder is ~/Documents/SaveVault/Backups (your Documents folder, then SaveVault/Backups). Keep it, type another path, or use Browse; Use Default resets it. Click Continue. You can change this any time in Settings.
  3. Protect your saves. Two toggles, both off on a fresh install: Daily automatic backups (changed saves are backed up every day at 03:00; tune it later on the Schedule page) and Live Protection while playing (rolling snapshots as a monitored game writes its save; choose the games on the Backup page).

Then choose Back Up Everything Now to run a first backup of every detected game, or Finish without backing up to do it yourself. When a backup finishes you’ll see You’re protected! with the number of games backed up.

The first scan waits for the game-database check, which downloads a newer database when one is available (Settings → Game Database → Update Game DB On Launch, on by default). The wait is capped at 15 seconds, and the scan banner reads “Checking for game database updates…” while it runs. If you chose Back Up Everything Now while a scan was still running, the backup waits for the scan to finish. The same two steps are available any time afterwards, from the Backup page or the CLI, as below.

1. Scan for games

Section titled “1. Scan for games”

SaveVault matches your installed games against the PCGamingWiki / Ludusavi database. The first time you run the app it scans once. Later launches reuse the cached scan rather than rescanning, unless Settings → Game Scanning → Auto-Scan On Launch is on or the game-database check finds a newer manifest. To rescan on demand, click Rescan games on the Backup page, or run:

Terminal window
savevault-cli scan

New titles are flagged so you can spot what’s been added since last time. If a game isn’t detected, add it as a custom game or point SaveVault at the right install root.

2. Back up

Section titled “2. Back up”

From the Backup page, select games (or all) and click the backup button, labeled with your selection (for example Backup 12 Games) — or from the CLI:

Terminal window
# Everything detected
savevault-cli backup


# Specific titles
savevault-cli backup --games "Elden Ring"

Backups are written to your backup folder (by default ~/Documents/SaveVault/Backups) as self-describing compressed archives. Each contains a README.txt and a savevault-manifest.json, so you can restore by hand even without SaveVault.

Next

Section titled “Next”