Note: This project is not yet completed and is still in active development.
GameDrive is a self-hosted file-synchronisation tool oriented towards video game save files, and is designed to mimic the simplicity of Steam Cloud (without being limited to Steam games).
This tool is not a fully-fledged backup solution. It is not designed to keep snapshots of saves for X amount of days and to then allow you to restore these individual snapshots.
Instead, GameDrive is designed to make it as easy as possible to synchronise game saves between multiple machines. Because of this, GameDrive makes a local backup of all game saves that are overwritten with versions from the cloud, and a conflict detection regime has been created to request user input whenever the system is uncertain of whether a file should be uploaded/downloaded/removed altogether.
The application as a whole consists of two key components: GameDrive.Client and GameDrive.Server.
The server is responsible for handling user authentication, as well as comparing, uploading and downloading files. Whilst the client is responsible for identifying games/game saves, tracking these files, detecting deleted files, and submitting this information to the server.
File tracking is the process of creating a simple representation of an entire file. This allows information about a file to be sent over the network without sending the whole file, and includes data such as:
- The path of the file
- The hash/checksum of the file
- When it originally created
- When it was last modified
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Game Profile | Collection of possible game-save directories/files, as retrieved from the PCGameWiki. |
| Storage Bucket | Collection of storage objects grouped by an ID (typically the ID of a game profile). |
| Storage Object | Complete representation of a specific file at a given point in time. |