@SSully: Actually, I can see 500 MB being an issue. Skyrim, for instance has 12 MB save files. I only keep about 7-8 total, but I know a lot of people don't.

@Bruce: If you're talking about taking your local saves and copying them over to the cloud, it's as simple as a transfer to USB. Go into memory, choose the hard drive and select the save file, and then select copy to cloud saves. Cloud saving is not enabled by default. There's an option to turn it on in the system settings.

Way to catch up to what the PC has had for years now, Xbox!

Joking aside, cloud saves are amazing no matter which platform you're on. Does anyone know if you can transfer saves from an Xbox game to a GFWL-enabled game on the PC?

I love it, I no longer need to fear that my bought-on-launch-day 360 will explode from some crazy error and I'll lose all my stuff.

Long live the cloud!

@skrutop:

How do you transfer saves over? Ironically, I tried to do this with WWE '12, and I had severe problems. Several prompts came up, and one of them alluded to overwriting all of my saved stuff, so I steered clear of it.

It kind of annoys me that you have to turn on Background downloads to use the Cloud Save, but whatever. At least now I can finally back up my Fallout/Elder Scrolls files.

@spazmaster666: What if your 360 breaks before you put them on the USB stick? And 500 mb isn't enough? That is pretty impressive if you ask me. I never sat down to look at how much space my saves are, but i imagined they would be much less then 500mb. Also nothing flawless, but the chance of something happening is so small, and since you have your saves on your 360, usb, and cloud you apparently will be perfectly ok.

Had those on steam for a while now. But I guess xbox had to catch up at some point.

Now you see what playstation plus users have been enjoying for almost a year now. They give you peace of mind in the event that your save file gets corrupted.

@SSully said:

@spazmaster666: Cloud saves are great for everyone, because if something ever happens to that 360 of yours, you will always have your saves.

All my important saves are on my USB stick though and I also backup them up to my PC as well. Also, 500 MB is not nearly enough to store all my game saves. And what happens if Microsoft's servers crash? The Cloud is far from bulletproof since ultimately the data is sitting on a hard drive somewhere.

@spazmaster666: Cloud saves are great for everyone, because if something ever happens to that 360 of yours, you will always have your saves.

Cloud saves are a neat idea but completely useless for someone like me who only has one 360 (well technically I have two but I disassembled the other one/did bad things to it in the name of science).

Awesome, I've yet to use the new Dashboard much. I downloaded it and then they had a ton of problems getting people connected to live, I was one of them. After waiting an hour, I was able to sign in, but by then it was midnight and I just went to bed.

The Cloud Saves will probably be one of my most favorite parts of this update.

For anyone who didn't see the quick look, one of the lesser talked-about features with the new 360 dashboard is cloud saving. If you have two internet-connected 360s, your profile can now live on both systems. Additionally, there's an option to turn on cloud saves, which saves your files at MS. When you log into the other system your files are there waiting for you. Unfortunately, marketplace content can't be saved to the cloud which is an issue for Rock Band DLC in particular.

After trying out the cloud saves with Skyrim, I had zero problems with them. The saves are just as quick as offline saves, since they don't get uploaded right away. I have noticed that you're going to add about 20-30 seconds when starting up the game for the 360 to find and download the cloud saves. So that's something to consider. All in all, I'm really happy with the way that it works! Good on ya, MS.

edit: It actually only adds the 20 second cloud save loadup when you've switched consoles. So, for instance, I was playing all day on my main 360 and it didn't need to pull down any cloud saves. It'll only check when I log into my other 360.