In 2006, I purchased an Xbox 360, on a bit of a whim. I had gone to the store in the midst of a period of snow days, on hearing a rumor that Wiis were in stock. They sold out before I arrived, and with two cooped up and stir crazy kids plus a new HDTV at home, I took home an Xbox 360. I’ve been a big fan of the system ever since, but of course there were a few flaws. One of the most irritating (apart from the red ring of death) was the lack of storage methods.
Back in these olden times, you see, saving your Gamertag or your game progress was a straightforward affair: you stored it to the hard drive. Even though the first models of the Xbox 360 had USB ports, you couldn’t use a thumb drive for storage at all. Instead, Microsoft offered horribly overpriced memory units. These were the only options for quite some time.
As a big fan of couch co-op, along with my kids, we enjoyed playing our games even when we traveled. I remember several trips to visit my in-laws in Michigan, who also had an Xbox 360. We took our hard drive with us in order to play with our save games. Eventually, we purchased a second 360 (an Arcade model) when the boys’ DVD player died, and one of the big upsides to that purchase was the memory card. No longer would we have to pack an entire hard drive between socks and pajamas and hope it didn’t break on the trip.
Not exactly portable, is it?
Later on, the Xbox 360 was patched to with the capability to store information to USB drives. This made our lives much easier. I kept my Gamertag on the hard drive, one kid used the memory unit, and the other a battered old flash drive. If we wanted to play in the other room, it was easier, though still a hassle. It turns out that misplacing a memory unit is pretty easy in a teenager’s bedroom. Not an optimal solution, for sure.
Last year, a great solution to the problem rolled out via a system update. Cloud storage is now available for Xbox Live Gold users. 512 megs of cloud storage is available for each member. So far, this has been plenty of room for storing my Gamertag as well as dozens of save games, with room to spare. Note that you can’t store just any type of data in the cloud; no Rock Band tracks or other downloadable content can be saved this way. This is an absolute game changer as far as co-op is concerned.
Note the l33t Halo Reach theme
Setting up a cloud save game is very simple. From the System Settings menu, choose Storage, and then Enable Cloud Save Games. This will create a cache on a local storage device, so be sure you have 512 megs of storage space available on your hard drive. Once this process is completed, you can then start saving your games to the new cloud storage. As you play, the data is stored to your local cache, and then the next time you power down your Xbox 360, it stays in a low-power state just long enough to upload the new data. It’s quite seamless and very easy to set up.
So what about your Gamertag? Well, you can’t store the Gamertag on your cloud drive; that’s just not how it works. But you can sign in to your Gamertag from another console very easily. Just press the Xbox Guide button and choose the download profile option (you’ll need to be signed out of any profile to do so). You’ll be prompted to enter your Windows Live ID and password. Once you’ve done so, you can save any Gamertag associated with your Live ID to local storage on the new console. Your cloud saves will now be available! Easy as pie.
Can you tell I don't have a fancy video capture device?
The benefits of cloud saves are tremendous. Now, my kids and I can go back and forth between our two consoles without taking any storage with us. Everything is updated and synchronized via the cloud. I can go to a friend’s place, download my profile, and within moments, have access to my saved game data. Perhaps the best part of cloud storage is not worrying about losing data if a drive fails for any reason. No crying over the loss of game progress anymore! Just remember you have to have internet access to retrieve your saves from a new location.
While this editorial has focused on the cloud storage options specific to the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3 has a similar service. Playstation Plus members have access to 150 megs of online storage. PC gamers have more options for cloud storage, but perhaps the easiest is Valve’s Steam Cloud service. Any way you look at it, the cloud is a tremendous benefit for gamers. Never has having ready access to your favorite couch or online co-op save game data been so easy. As the next generation of consoles looms on the horizon, let’s hope that the trend for cloud storage continues.
Header image attribution: Flickr user cwwycoff1