HOW TO: Back up your GT Sport data (Pin me?)

[wowbaggerBR]

When I change to a new PS4 I never had a backup save on my USB, just a online server side save worked well.

I kinda expect the server side save to preserve my progress as I left. My main issue is content, such as my custom made liveries, which I know are on the USB backup, thanks to a previous experience with backing up saves on GTSport. But, since the external backup is a few days old, I don't know how the game will handle an older state save with the more up to date data on the servers: something has to give. Either it will overwrite the local one or the server one. Or could it be that it is smart enough to just fuse both together, preserving local data and the latest progress stats? I don't know and that's what motivated me to ask if anybody had a similar experience.

In the end, I know that replays and photos are all gone (although I have pretty much all of my pics exported on a USB drive as well, so it's only the replays that I won't be able to get back).

All I care about is having my liveries open so that I can still edit them and not having all my progress lost: getting back to level 47 would be brutal.

I'm not sure what will be lost when the game compares the server save with the backup, but it never hurts to try when facing the alternative. Just be sure to load the backup file onto the new harddrive before booting up the game, otherwise you will definitely be starting from scratch with no way to reverse it.

I guess it's the only course of action. I'll sure report back so others can learn from my misfortune.

 

[CBH]

I kinda expect the server side save to preserve my progress as I left. My main issue is content, such as my custom made liveries, which I know are on the USB backup, thanks to a previous experience with backing up saves on GTSport. But, since the external backup is a few days old, I don't know how the game will handle an older state save with the more up to date data on the servers: something has to give. Either it will overwrite the local one or the server one. Or could it be that it is smart enough to just fuse both together, preserving local data and the latest progress stats? I don't know and that's what motivated me to ask if anybody had a similar experience.

In the end, I know that replays and photos are all gone (although I have pretty much all of my pics exported on a USB drive as well, so it's only the replays that I won't be able to get back).

All I care about is having my liveries open so that I can still edit them and not having all my progress lost: getting back to level 47 would be brutal.



I guess it's the only course of action. I'll sure report back so others can learn from my misfortune.

That would be good if you report back and let us know .
All I know about saves if you have 1 PS4 and have a backup save that is a few days old, the older save will not overwrite your current server save.

 

[wowbaggerBR]

I'm back to report my findings about backing up your GTSport data after a hard disk failure.

Here's what happened and what I did:

- My PS4 hard disk failed on me last tuesday. It wasn't unexpected, it was an old drive that I used back in 2016 just because it was lying around and it had 1 TB. Never cared that much about it failiing due to the PSPlus saves being all backed up anyways, at least until GTS came along with this complicated save policy
- I was worried about my GTSport data due to the way the game handles saves and because of some issues people seem to have with their data. I knew from the start that photos and replays were all gone (and losing my replays was tough), but I was keen to get back my liveries in a open way so that I could edit them again. Due to some previous savedata swapping I knew I had a shot at get them back
- Fortunately, I had a backup on a USB drive. It wasn't that new - some 10 days old and this meant some liveries were gone, not to mention my progress within the game. In the end, what was open to debate was: would the game preserve my content stored on the USB when I got back to it? Everything would be open? Would it be overwriten?

Today:
- I bought a 2 TB SSD and installed GT Sport by downloading the whole thing
- Copied the savegame data on the USB to the console
- Booted up GTSport offline for the first time in order to test if the game would open the save: it did and it was all there, I was level 43 and had a Ferrari 458 as my car at that moment
- Closed the game and brought the PS4 back online
- Booted up the game again, this time online. GTS did its thing and updated my progress from what was stored on the server side. But I didn't lost anything content-wise: the liveries that were stored on the USB are all open and accessible within the game. And now the game says I'm level 46 with the XBow as my car at the moment, which is precisely how I left it when the disk died

So there it is: make sure to get your data backed up from time to time. I didn't use the Plus backup because it was even older. My Internet connection is not that great for uploading stuff and GTS saves are huge - some 240 megabytes - which explains why USB route is recommended in my case. But in the end, Plus or USB, make a point of backing up from time to time if you care about content that isn't stored on the server.