Steam Cloud is not a backup strategy. Hoard is.
Hoard is an open-source (AGPL-3.0) game save backup and sync system. You can Self-Host Without Account or Telemetry, or log in and play. The desktop app and the CLI work the same against either. Self-hosting needs no Hoard account and has no quota beyond your own disk.
Ships in eight languages, You can ask for other Language.
Steam Cloud, GOG Galaxy and friends work fine — right up until they overwrite a 200-hour save with a corrupted one from another machine, the publisher kills the service, or the game just isn't covered. Hoard is the boring, paranoid alternative: it snapshots your saves every time you stop playing, hashes every file, and lets you roll back to any earlier version or pull your entire library onto a fresh machine. Nothing is ever silently overwritten — that's the entire point.
Auto-detects your games. Watches your saves. Syncs in the background. Rolls back when things go wrong. That's it. That's Hoard.
Necessity is the mother of invention — I created Hoard because I needed it.
| Feature | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Versioned | Every session = new snapshot. Roll back to any previous version. Old saves never expire (self-hosted) or until you hit your quota (Cloud). |
| Verified | Every file SHA256-hashed on upload, re-verified on restore. Corruption caught before it overwrites your good save. |
| Compact | Content-hash deduplication: 10 versions of a 2 GB save cost ~2 GB, not 20 GB. Transfers are zstd-compressed; restores byte-for-byte (SHA-256 verified). The same dedup applies on upload: a second backup of the same game moves only the files that changed, only megabytes, not the whole folder. |
| Auto-detect | +20,000 games from the Ludusavi manifest, found through 10 signals: Steam libraries, Epic/GOG/Xbox launchers, running processes, filesystem scan, Windows registry, Steam Cloud stubs, Proton/Wine prefixes, wrappers and +20 emulators. Zero config. |
| Emulator support | PCSX2, RPCS3, DuckStation, PPSSPP, Dolphin, Cemu, Ryujinx, yuzu, Citra/Azahar, RetroArch, mGBA, melonDS, Project64, shadPS4, Vita3K, Eden, Suyu, Citron, Sudachi, xemu and Flycast. Pick from presets, tracked like any other game, you can manually add others, is easy. |
| Self-hosted storage | The server keeps your blobs on local disk or any S3-compatible bucket — MinIO, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, or an rclone serve s3 bridge in front of OneDrive/Drive/Dropbox. |
| Why a cloud and not P2P? | Your other PC is off. Your laptop is dead. Who has the save? An always-on server does, every version, ready before you sit down. |
| Cross-platform | Windows · Linux · macOS · SteamOS · BazziteOS - If you can play doom you can run Hoard, not a joke. |
Also includes a headless CLI — the sync engine (hoardd) runs as a background
service and the terminal (hoard) talks to it. Perfect for servers and Steam
Decks. No desktop required, just set it and forget it.
One codebase, two ways to run it:
- Self-hosted — run the same
hoard-serverbinary on your own box and point the app at it. No account, no quota — just your cloud. On a NAS it is two boxes to fill in: the Unraid template, or the Docker image —docker pull ghcr.io/rleeon/hoard, mirrored to Docker Hub asrleeon/hoard(amd64 and arm64, published on every release). Self-hosting guide for the rest. - Hoard Cloud — the hosted service at hoard.services. Sign in with Google, install the app, done. Free tier: 2 GB, 3 devices, full version history — free forever.
I have a Pro feature to all guys wanna help Hoard, gives you 100 GB. And unlocks Hoard Screen, an in-game overlay to see YT or other windows without alt-tabbing. Free includes a 1-week trial to this overlay feature, and a free user dont need Pro, is just comodity, only limit is Storage 2GB, if you hit it, Self-Host.
Hoard is an engine (hoardd) plus two faces: the terminal (hoard) and the
app. The installer works out which ones your machine wants and puts them all in
at the same version — a NAS or a server stops at the engine and the terminal, a
desktop or a Steam Deck gets the app too, in the same pass. Upgrades move
everything together, so the pieces can't drift apart.
In game mode there is nothing to keep open: the engine runs as a background service that starts with your session, so your saves sync with no window and no terminal.
Prefer the terminal, or running on a headless box (NAS / server / Steam Deck)?
Add --headless and it never fetches the app. Everything ships as standalone
binaries with no GUI deps.
You dont need install it, when you install the desktop you install Hoard-Cli, but here is the installer.
- Self-hosting guide — Docker, Unraid, bare-metal + systemd, and the headless CLI.
- Contributing — building from source, the release flow, and the architecture.
- Funding — where the money goes and what your sponsorship covers.
Hoard is free and open-source. Your support helps cover server costs and funds development.