Having a Game Data/Settings Restore Issue with PS5

DrRazorDoom

New member
Joined
Jan 31, 2025
Messages
2
Karma
0
I bought a PS5 with VR2 in December '23. I have seven games that I play, all VR2; one is No Man's Sky (>1100 hours since May '24). I have a 1TB thumb drive that I do backups to (don't trust PS+). I occasionally do full game backups of my PS5, i.e., games, game data, and settings. However, most often I backup the game data and settings only (< 3GB vs. >237GB).

On 1/25/25, while playing No Man’s Sky, I accidentally did something that got rid of a ship acquired during an expedition. No problem since I have a game data backup from 1/23. After doing the restore game data restore, all of my games, except for GT7 which has a disk, went away, i.e., nothing was restored and my games were gone. So, I did a full restore of all my games and data (237GB) from July '24 and that worked (but all progress of everything was obviously gone). So, I tried again with the 1/23/25 file - same result and same result when I restored the 237GB games and data file. This time, I tried a game data backup from 12/24/24 - same result (all games deleted). What I've done now is restore, again, the July '24 file.

I would really like to get my game data back from 1/23/25. Has anyone actually successfully restored their game data and settings only (not the games but the game data) on a PS5? If so, how did you do it? I thought about copying the game data file to a smaller 5GB thumb drive and trying that but would like to know if this has happened to anyone else and what did they do.

In advance, thank you!
 
Well, here is what I've tried further and my conclusions.

Today, I, again, did a FULL backup of everything. After the full backup completed, I removed the 1TB drive from the PS5 and took it to my PC. I copied ONLY two game DATA files (12/24/24 and 01/23/25) for checking out my theory. Those two data files went into the same directories (\PS5\EXPORT\BACKUP\202501232006_00 for example; the data file is 'archive.dat') that were created by PS5 on the 1TB drive, onto a newly formatted 28GB thumb drive. After completion of the copy, I went back to the PS5 and inserted the 28GB drive and did a restore of the game DATA I wanted (in this case it was 01/23/25). If Sony restored the game data into location X and games went into location Y then I should only have to reinstall the games (I know - if this worked then very, very dumb). RESULT: according to the PS5 restore program, the game DATA was restored but like before, all games were gone. Now to test my theory - I downloaded only one game: No Man's Sky. If my theory was correct, the game data was installed wherever Sony placed game data (different from where games are stored, e.g., different partitions) and the 01/23/25 data would be read by the newly reinstalled game and all would be as it should be. If that worked then I would reinstall all my games. Again, if this worked then Sony's backup/restore capability is only useful for full backups and they should just delete the data ONLY option. When I ran the program, it ran but with the data from this morning, e.g., it appears that PS5+ re-synched today's data from the cloud overwriting what I had just restored and, according to Sony tech support, you can't turn off PS+ when you do something like this. I'm now doing a full restore of everything that I made this morning and I will NEVER, EVER, do a game data ONLY backup on PS5 again. Dumbest backup/restore non-capability ever!
 
I agree. I would expect game data to include saves & settings but afaik with the PS5 you can’t backup save data. Sony seem to believe users can just redownload their games but not everyone has fast internet for this & even if they have it can still take some time to download their games game & any DLC.
You could turn off the internet via settings which would disable downloading their games game latest cloud save data.
 
Back
Top