While backups may seem cumbersome when everything is going smoothly, their importance becomes clear when disaster strikes. Whether it's a virus, theft, natural disaster, or physical shock, your machine can go wrong, leaving you with nothing but a blank slate. But having a backup in place, whether it's for your machine or your PS4 game data, can be a lifesaver, allowing you to restore everything to its former state and minimizing the disruption to your life.
If your PS4's hard drive is failing, you can replace it and restore your game progress from the cloud or a backup image, or clone the old hard drive to the new one, without having to reinstall all games and programs. However, some games may require you to purchase an activation key again when re-downloaded.
When starting up games on your PS4, it will ask if you want to automatically upload saved data to the Cloud. You can choose to do this at the beginning by pressing "Yes", or you can change your mind later by going to the game icon, pressing the triangle, and selecting "Yes" for PSN+ Auto upload save. If you accidentally said "No" initially, you can still enable auto-upload. Alternatively, you can manually copy your saved data to the Cloud, but this may not keep your latest files up to date.
To download your game saves, select your local user and go to Settings > Application Saved Data Management > Saved Data in Online Storage > Download to System Storage. From there, choose the game saves you want to download.
The PS4's cloud storage has limited capacity, with only 10GB available to store all data, including game backups. As more games are added and automatically backed up to the cloud, it's likely to fill up quickly. To free up space, it's recommended to backup PS4 data to other cloud services like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Qiling Cloud, and to keep multiple copies of important data on both the PS4's cloud and these external clouds.
Qiling Disk Master Professional helps you backup PS4 to cloud storage and save PS4 games to hard drive, making it easier to upgrade your PS4 hard drive. It offers two useful methods to achieve this.
This software, except for backing up data to cloud storage, also allows backing up data to NAS and network shared locations. A free trial is available for download to try it out.
Here we will take File Backup as an example and show you the detailed steps. You need to make some preparations in advance.
Preparations:
To backup PS4 data to Google Drive, first, download and install the Google Drive app on your PS4. Then, navigate to the Settings menu, select "Users", and choose the account you want to backup.
Step 1: To access your PS4 hard drive on your computer, you'll need to physically remove the hard drive from the console and connect it to your computer using a USB cable. This will allow you to view and access the contents of the hard drive on your computer.
Step 2: Download and install Google Drive desktop application on your computer.
Step 3: To back up your files using Qiling Disk Master, download and install the software, then launch it. From there, navigate to Backup > File Backup to initiate the backup process.
Step4: To manually select game data on your PS4 hard drive, click on the "Files" or "Folder" option. This will allow you to browse through your hard drive and select the specific game data you want to access or manage.
Step 5: Click the down arrow at the end of the "Step 2" box, then click "Select a cloud drive".
Step 6: Select OneDrive and click OK.
Step 7: Click Proceed to run the backup.
Tips:
This article showed how to backup PS4 data to cloud, but cloud backup isn't the only way to protect your PS4 data. With Qiling Disk Master, you can also easily backup PS4 to an external drive, sync multiple folders to Google Drive, clone your hard drive to an SSD, and more. Download the software to discover these additional features.