Digging Into Sharing PS5 Game Saves
Yes, you absolutely can share game saves between PlayStation 5 consoles! The PS5 offers robust save sharing capabilities for continuing your gameplay anywhere. PlayStation‘s cloud storage, external drives, and Console Sharing features allow you to easily port saves to or from other PS5 systems.
As an avid gamer myself, I‘ve utilized all three methods to shuffle my PS5 saves between friends‘ consoles and my own. While largely seamless, I have encountered the occasional stumbling block. In this post, I‘ll provides some expert tips and hard-learned lessons for flawlessly sharing PS5 game saves.
Cloud Storage Tops for Convenience
PlayStation Cloud Storage integrated with your PSN account is hands-down the most convenient way to replicate PS5 game saves externally. Your saves automatically sync whenever you close a game or enter Rest Mode. Then you simply download that cloud data to any other PS5 logged into your account.
I lean on cloud sharing constantly when jumping between gaming sessions at my PS5 Pro and 4K TV setup, and continuing via Remote Play cloud streaming on my gaming laptop when traveling. It truly enables gaming anywhere with no need to manually juggle drives or discs!
- Cloud sharing supports PS4 & PS5 saves up to 1GB each. You get a generous 100GB total cloud capacity. More than enough room for dozens of active game saves, though screenshot and video clips do nibble away at your limit.
- An always-on internet connection is required of course to actually sync with PlayStation‘s remote cloud servers. I learned that lesson once on a remote camping trip! No connectivity meant new saves didn‘t transfer.
- PlayStation also stations cloud servers regionally to reduce lag. So if you share saves internationally, download times may take a few minutes longer as data shuttles across continents.
In summary, seamless automatic integration makes PlayStation Cloud sharing a gamer‘s best friend for grabbing saves anywhere there‘s an internet connection.
External Drives – Share Larger Local Saves
For console-to-console local transfers, external USB drives offer a quick way to physically ferry game saves around. Unlike cloud sharing where saves max out around 1GB each, block storage on high-capacity portable SSDs has practically no limit.
I recently helped a friend migrate his PS4 Pro saves over to a shiny new PS5 console using a 2TB portable drive. Over a dozen 100+GB game saves for titles like RDR2 and NBA 2K23 copied directly in just minutes. Far more convenient (and cheaper!) than re-downloading his entire library.
The process does involve a few manual steps:
- On your main PS5, plug in an external drive with sufficient capacity to hold all saves.
- Navigate to Settings > Storage > Console Storage > Saved Data and Game/App Settings > Saved Data (PS5) > Copy to USB Drive.
- Select all desired game save data and pick your mounted external drive as the copy target.
- Once copied, disconnect your external drive and connect it to your secondary PS5 console.
- Follow the same menu path as above, but instead pick the Copy from USB Drive to System Storage option to transfer those saves locally.
While easy enough when you know the menus by heart, the plug-and-play nature of cloud saves is more seamless. But for sheer volume and transfer speed, external drives can‘t be beat for local console sharing scenarios.
Console Sharing – Extra Permissions Needed
Sony also baked in a special Console Sharing permission specifically intended for sharing your game library and associated saves between two PS5 consoles.
Both participating PS5s must enable Console Sharing under Settings > Users and Accounts > Other > Console Sharing and Offline Play. You can only share with one other console at a time. And naturally the secondary PS5 needs login access to the account that purchased any shared digital games.
I have Console Sharing configured with my younger brother‘s PS5. We both gain access to all of each other‘s games while still retaining separate trophy data and saves. It‘s a nice perk for accessing more games while only buying titles individually.
Console Sharing does also enable direct save synchronization without any manual intervention. Since both systems link to the same account and underlying entitlements, freshly written PS5 saves auto-sync across the LAN via Sony‘s servers to the paired console.
The main limitation here is that both systems must be online simultaneously for real-time sharing. You can‘t grab saves from offline consoles since syncs only initiate at game close or Rest Mode. For spontaneous local transfers, external drives are more flexible.
Pick Your Best Method!
So which sharing method works best? Here‘s a high-level comparison:
| Method | Convenience | Speed | File Size Limits | Permissions | Connectivity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Storage | High | Moderate (Server-dependent) | 1GB per save file | Account-linked | Requires persistent internet |
| External USB Drives | Moderate | Very fast for local | Virtually unlimited | Manual file transfer | Ad-hoc local connections |
| Console Sharing | Moderate | Fast sync | 1GB per save file | Paired console access | LAN connections, with simultaneous internet |
For most gamers, PlayStation Cloud Storage offers the ultimate 1-2 punch of convenience and portability. External drives provide efficient bulk local transfers. While Console Sharing mainly grants friends or family shared game access, with save syncing as a bonus.
Pick the option that best fits your personal gaming profile and console usage models!
Beware Corrupted Data and Anti-Cheat Blocks
While PlayStation permits open game save sharing, that doesn‘t mean the process is always problem-free. In my experience, hard crashes during autosaves can produce corrupted data that refuses to sync properly across consoles. Rebuilding the database under Safe Mode rectified one particularly stubborn Elden Ring save.
And as sharing becomes commonplace, some competitive multiplayer titles now outright block cross-console sharing as an anti-cheat measure. This includes Apex Legends, whose cross-progression FAQ explicitly states:
"Right now, we do not support player console save data transfers to discourage potential competitive integrity risks it could introduce."
So if you main competitive online games, console hopping might stay relegated to solo titles and local multiplayer. Publishers take dim views of say a Rank 1 player on Xbox miraculously emerging on PlayStation or Switch!
All in All, Sharing Adds Flexibility
Thanks to the interconnectivity of modern gaming, PlayStation 5 empowers gamers to access their saves virtually anywhere across multiple consoles:
- PlayStation Cloud Storage enables frictionless cross-console and cross-platform saving directly linked to your account.
- Local external drives provide efficient system-to-system transfer of bulk saves.
- Console Sharing takes advantage of account pairing and LAN syncing between trusted consoles.
Just be cautious of rare corrupted files that refuse sharing, and respect multiplayer competitive barriers where they exist.
At its core, PS5 save sharing grants unprecedented autonomy over your game data. And that flexibility lets us gamers play more of the titles we want, how we want! Convenience we once could scarcely imagine during the age of Memory Cards on PS1 and PS2.
What methods do you use for accessing your treasured PS5 saves across systems? Have you encountered roadblocks while sharing data? Let‘s swap war stories in the comments below!
