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Standards are hard… I get it. But it would be really nice if I could actually get all my games into the same place (ideally $Env:USERPROFILE/OneDrive/Documents/My Games on Windows). That way that they are included in my automatic OneDrive Backup of my $Env:USERPROFILE/OneDrive/Documents directory.

Enter Windows Junctions.

Background

Windows Junctions are effectively hard links for directories. They all Windows to reference the same physical storage from different logical directories.

By creating a Junction in OneDrive pointing to the directory where the files really live, this will allow OneDrive to sync the files and keep them backed up in to the cloud on a regular basis.

Below are the example snippets (in Powershell) showing how to configure things. Note, for my setup, I’ll be storing things in the base path (in OneDrive) of: $Env:USERPROFILE/OneDrive/Documents/My Games/

Satisfactory

Satisfactory was the first game that I did this for, and there I (for what ever reason) chose to only store the saved game folder, and not all the game files.

# Make the Junction in OneDrive pointing to the Satisfactory save data
New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path  "$Env:USERPROFILE/OneDrive/Documents/My Games/FactoryGame/" -Target "$Env:LOCALAPPDATA/FactoryGame/Saved/"

Factorio

For Factorio the attempt was to store the saves AND the all the blueprint files, so therefore I linked the entire Factorio directory.

# Make the Junction in OneDrive pointing to the Factorio user data
New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path  "$Env:USERPROFILE/OneDrive/Documents/My Games/Factorio/" -Target "$Env:APPDATA/Factorio/"

References

Updated:

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