How to download game saves on ps4

Whether you’ve got a brand new PS4 console for the first time, or whether you’ve had the console for a while, you might be unsure of how to transfer your game save data over the cloud, or how to generally get it from one PS4 to another. In this PS4 game save data guide, we’ll be walking you through how to transfer your PS4 game save data, whether it’s by the cloud, or by USB stick.

How to Transfer Your PS4 Save Data

Every time you play a game, even if it’s for the first time for merely a few minutes, a folder will be made within your PS4, and all the save data for that particular game will be stored within that one folder. As you go, playing more and more games, more and more folders will be made within your PS4’s storage to hold the save data for all the games, but don’t worry about burning through all your storage space with save data, as it’s minimal in comparison to the install size of many PS4 games.

But say that you need to transfer your save data for one particular game from your PS4 to another PS4. There are two ways of getting this save data from one console to another: through the cloud, or through a USB stick.

The USB stick works exactly as you think it would. Simply insert the USB stick into one of the many USB ports on your PS4, and select the Settings option along the top of the PS4 home screen. Now scroll down to Application Save Data Management, and once you’re inside this option, select the Save Data in System Storage option. From here, you can then select the Copy to USB Storage Device option, and the PS4 will prompt you to select the USB stick that you previously inserted into your console.

From here, it’s simple, as all you have to do is select as many games as you want (or as many as your USB stick can hold), and opt to either copy or move the respective game save data over to the USB storage device, which shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. We should mention that copying the save data is preferable to outright moving it, as it means that should you lose the USBs stick for whatever reason, you’ll still have the save data back on your PS4.

How to Transfer PS4 Save Data Over the Cloud

The other way of transferring your PS4 game save data is through the cloud, but to access this you’ll have to have an active PS+ membership subscription. If you have the active membership, then you’re all set to begin transferring data through the cloud, and to kick things off you’ll need to head back to the Application Save Data Management option within the Settings menu.

Head back into the Saved Data in System Storage option, and you’ll be presented with the Upload to Online Storage option. Select this, and the PS4 will then prompt you to select the games whose save data you wish to upload to the cloud. You can do them by one game at a time, or you can press Options on the PS4 Dualshock controller, bringing up an option that allows you to select multiple games at once for uploading.

There’s also a very simple option that you can access straight from the PS4 home screen, which will allow you to download save data for every PS4 game you can see from the main screen. When you’re on a PS4 game tile on the home screen, you can press Options on the PS4 Dualshock 4 controller, to bring up a new menu on the right hand side of the screen.

From here, you can choose the Upload/Download Saved Data option, which will let you compare the saved data you have in your PS4 storage, against any saved data for that particular game that you have in the cloud. From here, you can opt to download or upload all the data you like, in order to make sure that you’ve got the latest saved data for that particular game on your PS4.

How to Set Up Auto Upload on PS4

But there’s actually a far easier way of doing all this, provided you’re okay with potentially hundreds of save data files being stored in the cloud at once. In the Application Save Data Management menu, you can select the Auto-Upload option which, as it says on the screen, automatically uploads all new save data from the PS4 to the cloud, while the PS4 is either turned on, or in rest mode.

If you select the Auto-Upload option, the PS4 will then choose which games you want to automatically upload save data to the cloud, and you can opt for as many as you want. This is arguably the easiest way of making sure your latest save data is always in the cloud, so that if anything should ever happen to your PS4 and you have to replace it, you know all your save data is ready to be re-downloaded right away.

This brings to a close our complete guide on the various ways on uploading and downloading PS4 game save data, so you should now have no problem ensuring that the most recent data is always in front of you.