Where Are Stardew Valley Saves & How to Backup Its Files

Ariel Mu
3 min readMay 18, 2021

Stardew Valley is a fantastic simulation role-playing video game released by Microsoft Windows in 2016. It is an open-ended country-life character game that allows players to participate in various activities like growing crops and raising livestock on the farm.

To keep the farm safe, a lot of players want to back up the Stardew Valley saves. This game doesn’t use an incremental backup system like Skyrim. It uses a one-and-done save slot to back up saves. That means your old game saves slot is overwritten with the new game saves. Once one of the saved files gets corrupted or missing, your game might be unplayable. To avoid this, you can find the Stardew Valley save location and back up its files to an external drive.

Where Are Stardew Valley Saves

To back up saves, the first thing you need to do is to know the Stardew Valley save location on your machine. Here all Stardew Valley saves have the same folder structure: a folder with some XML files inside it. You can also transfer the game saves from one operating system to another one without issue.

According to a survey, we found that the Stardew Valley save location varies from different operating systems. The following are several common situations:

  • Windows: C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\StardewValley\Saves. If you are using Steam, then the Stardew Valley save file location should be in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Stardew Valley\Mods or C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Stardew Valley\Mods
  • macOS: /Users/[USERNAME]/.config/StardewValley/Saves or /Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Stardew Valley
  • Linux: ~/.config/StardewValley/Saves/ or /.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Stardew Valley

Now, you should know the Stardew Valley save location. Let’s go on how to backup Stardew Valley save.

How to Backup Stardew Valley Saves

To avoid accidental deletion, we recommend you back up the Stardew Valley saves to an external storage device. There are 3 types of backups for the Stardew Valley save that you should note. You can choose one based on your needs and play style.

  • Back up your current game saves that they won’t lose progress when a computer problem occurs.
  • Make an incremental backup of the game if you want to return to a past point via a snapshot.
  • Back up game saves before you modify any files or introduce game mods to protect the farm.

Now, let’s see how to backup Stardew Valley saves on Windows 10.

Step 1. Press Win + E keys to open the File Explorer, and then navigate to the C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\StardewValley\Save path or C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Stardew Valley.

Step 2. Right-click the entire Saves folder and select Copy. Also, you can open the Saves and make a backup of a specific save folder.

Step 3. Connect a USB flash drive or other external drives to your computer and open it in File Explorer.

Sep 4. Right-click any empty area in the flash drive and select Paste.

Where to find the Stardew Valley save location? How to back up Stardew Valley saves? Now, I believe you already have known the answers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Position: Columnist

Ariel is an enthusiastic IT columnist focusing on partition management, data recovery, and Windows issues. She has helped users fix various problems like PS4 corrupted disk, unexpected store exception error, the green screen of death error, etc. If you are searching for methods to optimize your storage device and restore lost data from different storage devices, then Ariel can provide reliable solutions for these issues.

Originally published at https://www.partitionwizard.com on May 18, 2021.

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