[mortenlarsen]

I have lost a few save-games, so I can relate. In my case it was because I forgot about them or the fact that, I did care if they were lost (I rarely game at all).

I have an "offline" Windows 7 gaming PC (only connected to a dedicated file-server, that holds the game installers, drivers, etc). I only use this PC to play Witcher 3, Fallout 3/NV, and a few others. I found this PC (i5-2500K) at the side of the curb, and invested ~$21 in 16GB of RAM, and ~$230 in a GTX 1660 Ti (6GB). It runs my games at Ultra settings in 1080p, so I am pretty happy with it.

It has happened that I have lost save-games because I did a reinstall and forgot some save-games because "There is nothing important on this PC!" ...doh... I then switched to using Duplicati for backing up save games, screenshots and game configs to the dedicated file-server.

I don't bother with that anymore though, because the gaming PC now runs off a FibreChannel SAN backed by ZFS Volumes. So I have snapshot, rollback and clones. Which is also quite useful for testing drivers, and rolling back to "a clean install" or "a clean install + windows updates via WSUS-offline" without waiting for the installer or updates.

[tommsy64]

Your current gaming PC setup sounds like what I'd want. Can you give some details about the SAN hardware? What does it take to have Windows boot off of a FibreChannel SAN that's backed by ZFS?

[humpydumpy]

Your gaming setup sounds similar to mine, but more sophisticated. I also have an offline win7 gaming PC. Unfortunately many games still require windows, but for some it is possible already to play on Linux. And it is just too much effort for me to keep a windows installation reasonably secure, to prevent games from phoning home. So offline it is. To install games, I put the game installer (in most cases bought from gog) on a USB storage device. This doesn't happen too often, I don't have as much time for gaming as I would like to. Like the sibling comment, I too would be interested in more details about your setup