Topic: Does save data upload to the cloud incrementally?

We've just got Pokemon Snap, and my wife has already upgraded her album size twice. Between us, our two save files now total 1.7GB...!

Will this reupload to the cloud every time we quit, or does it (can it?) only upload the bits of the save file that have changed?

I know I could probably investigate, but I'm hoping someone else already has...

@TryToBeHopeful If internet/wifi is enabled, every time you quit the game, the system seems to update your game progress to the cloud. You can look for yourself to check if it's backed up.

Press (+) on the game's home screen tile.
Select Save Data Cloud to see which user profiles are backed up.

• Whilie in there, if they aren't backed up, you can manually update your cloud save backup by selecting the user profile. (Only user profiles linked to the Switch Online can be backed up to the cloud.)

Thanks, what I mean, though, is does it have to upload 707MB every time, or if there's 50MB of new/changed data can it just upload that (like a delta update)? It looks like maybe it does upload the whole lot each time (took about 7 minutes to upload 700MB, which I think is a speed consistent with my internet package).

@TryToBeHopeful Short answer, I don't know if they overwrite the whole cloud save file. Since the Nintendo Switch Online cloud service launched, I've never seen any detail as to whether it's overwriting the whole save file or not. I'll be surprised if anyone here knows, although I welcome it. I'm just giving you a heads up as to what to expect here.

Its possible your internet service is a factor. When I do a manual cloud save update over 5g wifi in the north american region it can often take 10-60 seconds(sometimes 2+ minutes). I'm not sure the wait time is directly related to file size (I think some of that could be the act of contacting the server). So, I'm not sure long wait time is a great indicator that you're overwriting the whole cloud save file.

With eshop, downloading games, or game updates, can be affected by internet traffic on nintendo servers. Downloads can be faster outside of peak server traffic times.

Maybe you're aware. You can leave your switch in sleep mode, and games will download later, some time over night when there's less traffic. I think cloud saves probably happen in sleep mode too. (disregard any of this if you already knew, just trying to be thorough)

I’d recommend to just turn automatic backups off for games with large save files, since the most likely answer is that it is taking that large file and uploading it over and over every time it notices it’s been updated.

Cheers all!