Restoring

Restores are designed to be safe to preview and portable across machines.

Preview first

# Show the resolution plan and embedded README — writes nothing
savevault-cli explain path/to/backup.zip

# Simulate the full restore
savevault-cli restore path/to/backup.zip --dry-run

Same machine

Thanks to portable placeholders, a same-OS restore just works:

savevault-cli restore path/to/backup.zip
savevault-cli restore path/to/backup.zip --include saves   # or configs / both

New machine

Placeholders resolve against the new machine’s environment, so a backup taken under C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming restores cleanly to C:\Users\Bob\AppData\Roaming. Restore a whole folder of archives at once:

savevault-cli restore-batch path/to/backups/

Across operating systems

Cross-platform restore is opt-in:

savevault-cli restore path/to/backup.zip --cross-platform

For Wine/Proton, materialize saves into a prefix:

savevault-cli restore path/to/backup.zip --redirect-wine

Redirecting paths

Override a single root for one restore, or set persistent redirects when your library has moved drives:

# One-off: send root 0 somewhere else
savevault-cli restore path/to/backup.zip --remap-root 0=D:/Games/Skyrim

# Persistent prefix rewrites
savevault-cli redirects add restore C:/OldSaves D:/NewSaves
savevault-cli redirects add bidirectional D:/Games C:/Canonical/Games
savevault-cli redirects show

The Backup and Restore pages show a banner when a redirect applies, with a per-run toggle to ignore it.

Launcher cloud saves

When a game uses launcher cloud sync (Steam, GOG, Epic…), SaveVault warns you before restoring, because the launcher may overwrite a restored save on its next sync. Close the launcher — or disable that game’s cloud — before restoring if in doubt.