Disclaimer
Note that this does not apply to Linux devices, I know that a lot of people use Syncthing for them, and it’s just not for me, so this guide is for Android only.
For myself especially, who gets in a lot of different devices throughout the year for review and setup and all of that, having an easy way to just get them setup and running quickly, with access to my saves, is invaluable. But there’s a lot of you like me out there, so let me show you how I do it.
Plus, this actually syncs Dolphin saves, NetherSX2 saves, Yuzu saves and everything that’s hidden behind Android’s scoped storage, so you’re going to want this. The previous app that I was using to sync saves didn’t allow Dolphin saves or these others to work, but this does.
Backup your Saves
Now, I need this disclaimer here, but since we’re dealing with saves, a lot can go wrong. You should backup your saves somewhere else if you’re going to do this, just in case. I haven’t lost a save yet, but I also know what I’m doing so it’s a bit different, but we’ll do it the easy way in this tutorial.
If you need to locate all of your saves ahead of time to back them up, click here. Once you know the path, it’s as simple as just connecting your device to your PC using USB and just copying files over to back them up.
Lastly, this guide is for cloud syncing, not local syncing. Meaning we’re going to be syncing to your favorite cloud service, I’ll be using Google Drive. An important feature for me in a syncing program was for it to work when I’m not at home, and since this works anywhere in the world, it’s perfect. This means that like me, who has many Android devices, they all sync to each other and the cloud in perfect harmony allowing me to just pickup and play from one device to the next, the same save and the same game.
Preparation
As for some preparation ahead of time, there’s a few things. Number one, make sure that you have your emulators already installed of course, and ideally you’d want some saves already. Number two, I would use your main device first for setting everything up. I’ll show you how to add other devices after this one to sync everything, but just use your main devices for the first setup.
Download and setup FolderSync
Alright, let’s jump right in. First up, you’re going to need to download the app called FolderSync from the Google Play Store. Go ahead and open it.
Agree to the terms and accept the privacy policy.
Now you need to give it access to permissions for your device. Click each and give access.
You can skip location in background unless you only want to sync saves on certain WiFi networks. For 99% of you, skip this.
Once you have your green checkmarks, click Finish and we’re now at the main foldersync screen.
Syncing RetroArch Saves
The first emulator we’re going to sync is RetroArch since that’s likely the one everyone has and wants to sync. Now, there’s a very big asterisk here for RetroArch, and syncing both saves and states. For saves, the asterisk is a bit smaller, but let’s say on one device you’re using one RetroArch core for a system, and on the other device, you’re using another RetroArch core for a system, and they both save in different file formats. When you sync, it’s not going to work, neither device will be able to use that save. Also, for save states, it’s the exact same thing.
There’s a few things that you can do, but personally what I do is use the exact same RetroArch cores on all my Android handhelds (and well, actually all of my handhelds, not just Android), and if you want a list, check here. That way, there’s zero issues with me syncing saves and states and I’ve never had a single issue continuing on multiple devices this way, so I would highly, highly suggest it.
Let’s do RetroArch Saves first, which is syncing the actual in-game saves that you make.
So click Create folderPair bottom right in FolderSync.
Go ahead and give it a name and I’m going to call it RA Saves. Keep Sync v2 selected and next.
Send saves to the cloud
Now we’re at the first big decision, we need to tell the device how to sync. Ultimately, two way is what we’re going to be using, meaning that files stay in sync both on the device and in the cloud, keeping them the same. However, we don’t have our saves in the cloud right now, and we need to get them to the cloud. The option for to right folder is what we want for our very first setup, so click that and next.
Now we need to choose our folders and they could have labeled them better, but left folder is local, meaning the device’s folders. Right folder is your cloud drives folder.
Go ahead and click select folder, and you want to navigate to your internal storage/RetroArch/saves folder and select it. That’s the path to your saves in RetroArch if you checked my website from before.
Next scroll down to right folder and click SD card, then add account. Now you want to select your cloud service, and like I mentioned before, I’ll be using Google Drive. Sign in to your cloud service and then feel free to test it to make sure it works by clicking Test. Then click the back arrow when done.
Now tap SD card again, and change to Google Drive or whichever cloud service you chose. Then Select folder. Now you should see your folders that you have on your cloud service, and you can now decide where you want to save your games to. For ease of simplicity, I’m just going to create a folder right here called Saves. And inside of that folder, I’m going to create a folder called RA Saves, for RetroArch Saves. Click that folder and select, bottom right.
Then go ahead and click Next. Then click Save.
First Sync
We’re now on the folderpair syncing screen. So far, all we’ve done is say hey, we want to copy all of the files that we have in the RetroArch Saves folder to our cloud services RA Saves folder. But it hasn’t done it yet, so let’s do so. Click the Sync button on the left.
Depending on how many saves you have, this could take some time.
Now, this screen here doesn’t give you a lot of information as the sync is happening, so wait for the sync to finish and then we’re going to click the back arrow top left. Then click History. And you’ll see what exactly has synced. If you click the Plus icon, you can see further what you did. This screen will also tell you if there’s any conflicts.
Change to two-way sync
Head back, click the folder icon and then click our folderpair to get back where we were. Now, we have both our device and cloud folders with the exact same files, so we can now select Two-way as the sync type. Once you do, any changes you make to your files in the cloud, or locally, will be synced, exactly what we want especially if we’re going to add more devices into this mix. Go ahead and click sync again and there should be no changes.
FolderPair Settings
Now let’s look at a few options for this sync. Click sync options at the top right, and personally, I enable sync deletions, so if I delete a file or save on either end, it deletes it from the others. Personal preference.
Scroll down and we have to tell Foldersync how to decide on conflicts, so for example let’s say you made a save on your device, but you were offline and forgot to connect to WiFi, then you want to another device, played the same game and made a save. When the first device reconnects to WiFi, it’s going to want to sync, but you now have two saves with different timestamps and it’s all out of sync. So what do you want to do? Personally, I overwrite the oldest save, which hasn’t resulted in any issues.
Scheduling
Now let’s get to my absolute favorite feature out of everything. There’s an option here called Instant sync, and we can’t enable it until we enable scheduling, because right now, our syncing is manual – we have to push the Sync button ourselves to get it to do so, but we don’t want that, our time is valuable.
Head to the Scheduling tab then the Schedule button. I’m just going to call it sync.
Click the first checkbox to use as default. Now you want to select how often you want to sync your saves. Obviously, this will have an impact on battery life depending on your device, and it’ll be personal preference for how often you want to sync, but you can leave it at 12 hours and I’ll show you why.
Head to the Connection tab, and you can add some settings here if you’d like, for example if you only want to sync while charging, or only on wifi, or only certain WiFi networks.
In the Notifications tab, do you want to know when your syncing is done, and if any errors happened and all of that. Personal preference on all of these, I’m just going to enable show errors. Then click Save.
So now, every 12 hours, it’s going to try and perform a sync and it’s all automatic, great. But that doesn’t help us if we want to swap between devices before that 12 hours, I don’t want to have to come back here and manually click the Sync button.
Instant Sync
That’s where that instant sync feature comes in, so head back to the FolderPair Sync Options tab. If I enable Instant Sync, and this is my absolute favorite feature, it will instantly sync any changes we make to our folders.
So, for example, if I jump into a game and I play that game and I decide I want to save it, and then we go and check Foldersync’s history, you can see it already transferred our save right away. It didn’t wait 12 hours, it just did it right away for us, which is beautiful because within seconds, you could save, turn off your device and jump over to another handheld and keep playing right from that same save.
Syncing RetroArch States
I’ve now showed you all the steps, so imagine now that all of the next folders and emulators that you need to sync, is exactly the same steps we just did. Sync to the right folder, then change to two way, and enable the settings we did for each folder pair and setup as many folder syncs as you want. Let me quickly do RetroArch States.
- RetroArch States are located in the internal storage/RetroArch/States folder
- In Google Drive, I create an RA States folder
- Set to to right folder for syncing, click Sync and it sends all my files to the cloud
- Toggle to two-way sync
- Adjust scheduling, instant sync and other settings
So now, all of our Saves and States are sync’d from the device to the cloud perfectly, we’re all set and we can now add more emulators or other devices. Follow all of these same steps, and I shared it before, but if you want to know the paths to saves from other emulators, check here because honestly at this point, the only information you need is the Path to saves from other emulators. Follow everything we just did and you’d be set for as many emulators as you want.
Adding other devices
But now here comes the question, how do you add another device to this mix? You’ve just setup all of your syncing, so I plugged in my Odin 2 and you can see I’m syncing GameCube, PPSSPP, RetroArch, and Wii. You might have more, if you’re syncing NetherSX2 and Yuzu for example, which both also work. But either way, you have all your syncs setup on your main device, and you just bought a new handheld, cause of course you did, let’s add it into the mix.
Easiest way, is just to backup everything we did here and restore it on a new device. If you click the hamburger menu bottom left on the main FolderSync screen, scroll down to Settings, then Backup. Click Backup folder and change it to your Download folder. Then select Backup database. Skip adding a password. Now go open your file manager of choice, I strongly suggest Solid Explorer. Head to your internal storage/Download folder and you should see the foldersync db zip file right there. There’s a million ways to do this next part, but just get this zip file over to the new device that you want to start syncing with.
Either email it over, copy this to your PC over USB then do the same to the new device. Upload it to the cloud and grab it from the new device. Just pick a way, move that file to the new device. Personally, I just connect via USB and do it that way.
Setting up another device
Alright, the zip is on the new device, let’s install Foldersync from the Google Play Store on this new device again. Agree to terms, privacy policy and give all the permissions, everything we did before.
Now from the main screen, hamburger menu, Settings, Backup, Restore database and navigate to and select the zip file we moved over. Restart the app. If you click the folder icon, you’ll see all of your FolderPairs right there and ready to be synced.
Turn off scheduling
But now this is important, go into each of them and turn off scheduling for a second. We just added a new device, that likely has saves on it unless it was brand new out of the box, and we have two way sync enabled. If we allow these all to sync, it’s going to be a bit of a disaster, saves flying everywhere, the saves from this device, as well as the saves in the cloud and we don’t want that.
At this point, on this new device, are there any saves that you want to keep? Maybe you played Pokemon Blue on this handheld, but not the other, so you have a Pokemon Blue save. Personally, I would backup the saves from this device onto your computer through USB, and now that you know all the save paths for each emulator, that should be easy, then I would just manually upload those saves to the cloud folders. The end goal here is we want to get your save folders on this new device completely empty because we want to pull all the saves from the cloud to this new device, and sync it.
Download saves from the cloud
So where before we chose to right folder, to get saves from our device to the cloud, this time we want to get saves from cloud to the device. So go ahead and backup all the saves, and clear out the saves folder for any emulators you want to sync or if you’re sitting there staring at the screen because you have a device with no saves, let’s move on.
Let’s start with RA Saves once again. And once again, making sure that your RA Saves folder is empty. In the folderpair settings, change it to left folder from two-way. Go ahead and click sync. If you want to confirm, just go to your file manager and they’re all there. Change it to two-way and enable scheduling, and that’s done.
Now just rinse and repeat for every other folderpair. My RA States folder is empty locally, so syncing it.
A weird bug you might run into is a red error when syncing and it says Folder not found, but you know the folder is right. On the folderpair screen, just click the left account folder and remap it then sync again, it’s just a weird bug when importing a database like we did. You can see it happened to me here with both PPSSPP States and Saves.
