Day 6 of the Write A Stupid Thing Every Day, or W.A.S.T.E.D, quarantine challenge that I’ve imposed on myself.

By: William Chandler

Is there a move that makes you feel more in control than just completely wiping all of your drives and reinstalling your Operating System? I really don’t think so. It says “My data doesn’t own me. I’ll just be rid of it, now,” in a bold way that makes people think you perhaps had information on clandestine operations or something. Truthfully, I’d been having a driver conflict issue after some hardware changes and rather than take the time to actually troubleshoot, I figured I’d just wipe it all and start over. The scorched Earth approach. It’s like demolishing your house and building a new one because the old one had a creaky floor.

Perhaps it is a placebo effect, but I do legitimately feel a difference in the responsiveness of Windows when I do this every 3 – 4 years. Startup feels faster and any needless programs or processes I mistakenly left installed long after I needed them are now, thankfully, gone. Although, as I’d written a few days ago, I’ve been playing some Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin, which I am pretty sure does not have cloud save support. This means that my save is now dust in the wind and I must start anew. An unfortunate bit collateral damage in my war against the needless accumulation of data garbage.

Anyway, it seems as though my One Drive synced the contents of My Documents and My Pictures, including my vast anime wallpaper collection. Thank God. This also means that any game saves in My Documents would be spared annihilation. I dug through it only to realize that maybe 1 out of every 10 games actually stores save data in the My Documents folder. So, I suppose the purpose of the article is thus: We need to have an industry standard location for all saved data, preferably outside of the messy Steam folder in Program Files.