How to sync Valheim to the Cloud

Greetings to all of you, warriors of Odin!

I know many of you are looking for easy ways to backup your precious worlds and characters, and since I haven't seen this method listed in a lot of places, I though that I could share my old "Minecraft Ultimate Backup System" with you. AFAIK, Valheim does use a very similar save system, with dedicated world and character files inside a personal local folder. So, this method should work perfectly.

Basically, it consists of moving your local Valheim folder to a secure folder (eg. inside Dropbox or Onedrive), and then creating a symbolic link to that new location.

A symbolic link works just like your regular shortcut, except that Windows sees it as a local folder. If I'm not mistaken, you could even point to a local server instead, but that's advanced stuff that's beyond my couple lazy neurons.

By doing this, you'll add a very handy cloud sync feature to the game, and should something happen, you can simply use the restore feature directly from your cloud service. It's worth mention that Dropbox creates versions of your files every couple minutes or something close to that. I'm not sure about the other services, but they should work similarly.

I've done it a couple days ago, and so far it all worked flawlessly. The game has found all my characters and worlds instantly, like nothing has changed at all.

Now, I use Windows 10 and Dropbox, but AFAIK you should be able to do it in any combination of systems and cloud services. Some locations and commands will be different but the logic is the same.

Important: While you could do this on windows 7 and below (you should really consider upgrading, btw), keep in mind that links work a little different on those versions. I've read somewhere that, once created, should you need to remove a link, it will erase the target folder altogether. Be careful!

Here's the how-to:

Firstly, make sure Valheim is not running. I'd close Steam, just to be sure.

Then, follow this script:

Find your Valheim personal folder. In my case (Windows 10), it's "%appdata%LocalLowIronGateValheim".
Copy the entire Valheim folder to your secure folder. (eg. Dropbox).
Rename the original Valheim folder to something like "BKP_Valheim". Don't do anything with it yet. You won't need it unless something goes terribly wrong (It shouldn't), but let's just keep it there for now.
Create the symbolic link. To do that:
Run the prompt with admin rights.
On Windows 10, the syntaxe goes like this: > mklink /d "link" "target". Of course, remember to change "link" and "target" to reflect your specific paths. This is what it looks like, in my case:

mklink /d "C:UsersmyuserAppDataLocalLowIronGateValheim" "D:DropboxValheim

If done correctly, the prompt will say that the symbolic link has been created, and you should now see it as a "shortcut" inside the local folder, along with the old "BKP_Valheim" folder.

Then, launch the game, check if everything is working. If all is fine, since the game doesn't use that "BKP_Valheim" folder anymore, you can delete it, move it somewhere else, or just leave it there for keepsake. All you really need there is the link to the new folder location.

Now go forth, slay your foes, build your fortress and celebrate with venisom, honey and blueberry, all in Odin's honor!

I'll leave some references below, if you want to learn more about symbolic links, and/or help me get a few more GBs in cloud storage 😉

And please, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.