One of the most annoying thing that a computer gamer would have to do when they reformat their hard drive to reinstall a clean Windows is they risk losing their game profiles and saved games. After spending a lot of hours playing the game to reach the level that you are in now, it would not be wise to start all over again. If the game itself provides a method to backup and restore the saved games, then it is all good. However there are still a lot of games out there that doesn’t offer you a convenient way to backup and restore your saved games.
This is when SaveGameBackup.net comes to play. The main purpose of this free portable tool is to allow you to effortlessly backup and restore game saves with just a couple clicks. Currently the latest database 65 which was released on 12/19/2011 supports up to 1379 games. You can view the complete list at this page.
To use SaveGameBackup.net to backup a game, download the program from the link at the end of this article, extract it and run sgbnet.exe. The program automatically detects the games that are installed on your computer and shows on the interface. First you must set the path where you want SGB to save the game backup to. After that, check the checkbox for the entry that you want to backup and click the Backup button. The backup will be saved into one single .sgbzip file.
To restore the backup, select the backup path of where the sgbzip file is and click the Refresh list button. Click the Restore button and it’s done. Make sure you’ve installed the game prior to restoring. Other than that backing up and restoring saved games, you can also use SaveGameBackup.net to share your saves with friends by sending them the .sgbzip file for them to restore on their computer.
The Options tab contains additional settings such as not overwriting old backups, adding datestamp to filename, detection methods and switching to a different language. SaveGameBackup.net runs on Windows from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7 and requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile.