Hi everyone;
It’s time for a discussion that’s been had in a few topics here and there, usually when it’s too late to help the victim of a bug or glitch.
I’m talking about protecting yourself against accidental game save deletion or corruption. Look, given how complex the computer code is in a AAA title as long and complex as a Borderlands game, bugs and glitches are inevitable. They happen. There’s no avoiding it, not when a game’s code can be 70 GB or more of data!
But when a glitch or bug happens that either corrupts, or completely deletes your game save, you can and probably WILL lose dozens of hours of gameplay, and all that rare, Legendary gear you farmed so long and hard for! And this is nothing new, EVERY game in the series has had occasional glitches that could corrupt or delete your game saves.
In fact, it became such a big problem on both BL2 and BL: The Pre-Sequel, that Gearbox issued game updates on both games that made the games AUTOMATICALLY create and maintain a Secondary, Emergency Backup Save File that the game could automatically use to recover your save if the main save became corrupt or deleted! The Devs really SHOULD HAVE kept that in for Borderlands 3, and they really need to implement it as soon as possible, but I digress…
So, here’s what you need to do TODAY, IMMEDIATELY, IF NOT SOONER!
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If you play on Xbox One, make certain your Xbox Live Cloud Saves are turned ON. And pray to whatever Gaming Gods you pray to that IF a glitch happens, you’ll be able to recover your save from the Cloud Saves. With Xbox One, it’s the only option available, and unlike on the Xbox 360, you can’t manually go in and upload or download game saves between your local hard drive and the Cloud Save server at a time of your choosing, at least as far as I can tell. So you’ll have no way to know how recent, or how old, the Cloud Save is. It’s that way with all the modern Cloud Save services from what I can tell, as the Epic Games Launcher doesn’t seem to let me directly control their Cloud Save service, either.
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If, however, you play on either PC, Mac, or PlayStation 4, there’s another step you need to start taking RIGHT AWAY! You need to get yourself a USB external drive of your choice. It can be a cheap USB key, something very affordable from Wal*Mart, or Target, or Best Buy, or wherever. Or you can use an external Hard Disk Drive, or an external Solid State Drive, whatever you like. The type of drive isn’t as important as having something you can use.
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Get that drive inserted into a USB slot on your system, get it properly formatted to work for your system, and then find your game save files on your system’s hard drive!
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I can’t tell you where they are on a PS4, or on a Mac, but on Windows 10 you’ll find them at This PC > Documents > My Games > Borderlands 3 > Saved > SaveGames. In that folder, you’ll find another folder with a really long string of letters and numbers as the name. THAT’S where your saved game files are stored! You’ll find 1 numbered file for each character, a Profile Save, and if you’ve used the Quick Save button command, you’ll find a Quick Save File. Copy ALL of them, and then open your external drive and paste them into it! Now your game saves are backed up, just in case!
And you need to REGULARLY back them up! I now do this after just about every play session. I actually have 4 backup files, and I rotate between them, like we used to do in the old days when RPGs automatically created multiple save files for us to use! This way, if something gets screwed up by a glitch, I can recover from my last good save.
For the Love of Scooter, protect yourself and all the time you’ve invested into this game! Start backing up your saves, because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. IF your game save gets corrupted or deleted and you DON’T have your own backup on an external drive, the ONLY way it can be recovered is if, and ONLY IF your Cloud Save is older than the messed up save file, but there’s no guarantees of that. Numerous players that have experienced one of these glitches have found out the hard way that the Cloud Saves backed up the corrupted file right after it happened. And there’s absolutely NOTHING that Gearbox or 2K can do to help you recover your game saves. The Cloud Save services aren’t operated by them (if they were, they’d presumably make that a feature of the SHIFT Account you have) so they have no access to those files.
So don’t be lazy, or apathetic, thinking it won’t happen to you. Because it can, and probably will, sooner or later. I was playing these games for 9 years before it happened to me the first time last year. BUT, because I had backed up my game saves, I WAS able to recover back to my last good save… but I DID lose the mission completion I had just done, and at least one Legendary weapon I got as a quest reward. But it could have been so much more worse than that. So plan ahead, plan for the worst, and protect yourself. That’s the best advice I can give you.
Oh, and my apologies to anyone playing BL3 on the Stadia, I don’t know anything about that system, so I don’t know if you can backup your game saves at all on there. Someone else will have to tackle that one. But the same principles apply as outlined above. Backup your game saves any way you can. If Cloud Saves is all they give you, at least use that. But if you have an option to backup on a separate drive, do that. For the love of Moxxxi, do that, please!
I hope this helps. Stay safe and healthy, stay at home right now unless you’re an Essential Worker (given what’s going on in the offline world,) and enjoy some Borderlands, Vault Hunters! 
