So I picked up insync a while back but never really had much of a need for it because I don’t need the type of file syncing offered (byte-for-byte copies, vs virtual storage). I figured I would never end up using it… until today.
I’m big into the retro gaming/emulator/rom thing but I have always had one big problem: My save games are always stored locally on each device and not easily transferable to other machines. In my case… my desktop, my raspberry pi with RetroPie, and my laptop.
Enter insync.
I was trying to come up with a way to centralize this, and I was exploring various options to mount remote storage on my local machines… but I ran into a problem. What happens if I’m offline and my remote storage is inaccessible by the emulators? Best case scenario I would get an error trying to save because the local resource is unavailable, worst case the emulator would just crash on me. Then I remembered about my insync account. This is just perfect. If I’m offline, my saves will sync up when I get back online.
I have a flight in a few weeks and wanted to play games on my laptop on the plane… but the whole no internet access thing was a problem.
So here is my tentative setup. On google drive, I created a new directory structure:
Emulation
Savegames
NES
SNES
GBA
Genesis
Savestates
NES
SNES
GBA
Genesis
Roms
NES
SNES
GBA
Genesis
Which maps to /home/<me>/insync/Emulation on all of my computers
Now, in each of my emulator’s configuration files, I can point the savegame/savestate/rom paths to my synced folders. I’m still setting things up, but so far it works brilliantly … and supports being online and offline. Thanks to the headless mode I can do this with my Pi too
Sorry to ramble, just excited to finally have a good solution to this.
To insync- You guys should advertise over on the RetroPie website and other emulation-related sites noting this ability, and maybe write up an article specifically for this. I think a lot of people would find value in this… it’s a problem for many of us.
Cheers
