How many times have your now-gen consoles kicked the bucket? I’m on Xbox 360 number 10, so I know how it all goes when the dreaded RRoD shows its ugly head. Luckily, my launch 60GB PS3 is still going strong, as is my launch Wii. One aspect of the Xbox 360 and PS3 that has a chance of dying is the hard drive. Because of the many moving parts, hard drives are prone to failure. With the rigorous usage we put our consoles through, it’s not out of the picture for one of these to go to the land of dead hardware.
Sony has a 10 year life span projection for the PS3 and Microsoft looks to keep the Xbox 360 on the market for at least 5 years. In that span, it’s safe to expect some sort of hard drive failure. How many of you have had a PC hard drive die? I see it happen everyday with drives from a year to 5 years old. With dust collecting in and around the electronics, ball bearings and drive platters can easily wear out and stop working.
What happens to all of your precious data when the inevitable happens? It’s gone. With PC’s, everyone tells you to backup, backup, backup. But that’s not an easy possibility with our consoles. Sure, Sony includes a backup utility in the PS3 firmware, but that makes a full system backup (including all game data and downloads). It also takes a fairly long time, so it’s feasible to perform on a regular basis. On the Xbox 360 front, there isn’t much to do in terms of backing up your game saves. And since game saves change frequently with our play time, this is something that needs to happen often.
For all of your demos, DLC, etc, you can always redownload from the Xbox Live Marketplace or the PlayStation Store. But what about all the work you’ve put in on those games you’ve purchased? Imagine losing a save for Oblivion when you’re 150 hours into the game. Ouch. This leads to my main point: could Microsoft and Sony offer online backups for your game saves? It seems like a completely feasible solution for either or both to offer in their network systems. Make it a scheduled weekly event or perform things manually from your home console.
Does this have to be free? Of course not. I’d gladly pay a monthly fee for this ability. For Xbox Live, why not bundle this service into the Gold package? On the PlayStation Network, offer this as a monthly or yearly subscription. Paying a bit for the peace of mind of knowing my hard earned accomplishments in my favorite games will be safe is a good investment in my mind. On the Wii front, it could be possible, but given the lack of depth and features of Nintendo’s online implementation, I think this is asking too much.
Would you pay for this type of service? Do you have other methods you use, such as transferring things to memory cards? Let us know in the comments.
I have a 500GB external drive setup on my PS3, and a 320GB internal. I backup once a week – takes about an hour, with about 100GB of data currently on the internal drive. Set the power option to turn off with no activity, and once it’s done, it turns off.
Good idea espically with the Xbox360’s just because the RROD alot and one of my mates got the RROD and actually it was his harddrive. I wish something like this came along sometime as some ISP’s are providing it now with the extra cost so i dont see how Sony and M$ couldn’t do it.
For the PS3’s current backup system, it would be nice if Sony would add a backup option only for game save data instead of everything on the hard drive. Most people don’t need or want to backup the entire system. Personally, I have over 50 game save files on my PS3. Having to back the changed ones up every week or so is very tedious. Sony could easily offer a backup option that only does game saves.
I agree. I would pay a small fee for peace of mind. This service would also be beneficial if you had the option to recover an save you wanted from other locations that you log into your gamertag or ID. Like myself I carry my Live account on a 512Mb memory card so I can play at friends’ houses. So if I could just pop in my card log in and then have the option to download my save and continue on from a friends house would be awesome. Even if the save was attached to my account only would be fine so when I took me memory card home my save could be pulled down and update my home system(s) and my friends’ system would not have any of my game saves.
Great post…!
WARNING!!!!!!
Not all PS3 games let you back up your game saves on a memory stick or external HDD. I recently had my PS3 finally die on me, (well only the BluRay drive). Im still able to play with anything stored on my HDD, just not disk based games. So I figured “hey contact Sony, back up my saves and voila, continue on my videogame hobby”, well that wont be the case as RainbowSIxVegas2 and RockBand 2 wont allow you to copy YOUR game save to an external source. So half way through my world tour, and now I have to restart everything. The only way is to purchase an HDD with atleast 120Gs in order to back up EVERYTHING on my PS3.
It also means that although I have a 2nd PS3 I cannot play these games unless I transfer everything from my broken PS3.
Great idea. I left a comment on n4g, but it pretty much says its a great idea. If the consoles can auto update your back ups it would save people who aren’t too savvy with back up drives a lot of trouble when the “inevitable” happens.
Good idea. I would pay for it. I am with ya Max.