Being a gamer myself I enjoy getting lost in lands, and stories, of fantasy and fiction. Although I probably don't put this amount of effort into other aspects I feel the need to treat my progress as I would with work - backup. I backup my documents to the cloud making use of Live@edu's Skydrive offering. This works well if you think a little before initiating Windows Live Mesh - I've mistakenly tried to sync 'My Documents' and quickly found that I filled the Mesh storage with things I didn't wish to backup. Thankfully I was able to rectify this. However, I have not been so lucky with Mesh on the Mac. I get extremely high CPU usage prior to even logging in (as much as 120% (2 cores)).

This means that I can't use it in quite the same way, a problem even in VM Ware as you can't sync with Mesh to a network location, which is fair enough. These files, over time, have been a lot of effort to make, keep track of and update. It's only right that they remain backed up in multiple locations. I've yet to find the perfect solution to this though. Mesh is close.

When you think about the amount of time you can spend playing a video game, the effort it takes and the sense of accomplishment that can be obtained through overcoming challenges within these ever-increasingly intricate and immersive worlds, which I would love to play a part in making one day myself, it is easily overlooked at how important the saving of this progress is. It's not like the older games, where you'd fire up a console and play to a certain point and have to turn off and leave it, only to rejoin the game from the beginning again if you didn't have a memory card.

With the ever increasing specifications of games consoles and computers saving files has become a standard. But, other than MMOs, we're responsible for creating backups of these saves. On the PC it can be a simple case of copying files to another location, as you would with work. On a console, however, this process isn't so easy. Xbox recently released an update to the Xbox 360 which allowed for the use of USB devices to save profiles, saves and other data to, for use on your console or a friends. This would have been especially useful if they hadn't speeded up the gamertag recovery process, which previously took a huge amount of time. Yet it doesn't recover your game saves.

This is a problem for the Xbox. The new console may not share the same faults as the previous generations, but they shouldn't be left out in the cold or forgotten. 3 red lights on the circle of light could see you waving goodbye to your console, and with it, possibly your saves. Those 30 hours you've put into ploughing through that RPG are now only shown by your Achievements, your developed characters lost and your position in the story only again reachable after the same amount of time. If it was work then it would be a disaster, as - in my opinion - it is in games.

Seeing as Xbox Live gold membership is a subscription service, unlike Sony's current free option, which I believe will have a paid for benefit soon enough. I believe that it should be possible to save 'To the cloud...' this would mean if I spontaneously popped around a friends house or was invited around after being out and didn't have my USB on me, which I wouldn't imagine I would, I could still recover my gamertag and game saves and continue in the fun as I would at home. Yes Xbox Live is awesome, but you still can't beat that nostalgic feeling of sharing a screen with a friend.

The backup could even be automated, you set a frequency of backup, or even attempt to save to the cloud at the same time as saving locally to ensure that backup is up to date. Or it could be performed manually, and reminders could be scheduled. The average game saves are under 1mb with the extremes seemingly in the range of 20mb or so. With space becoming increasingly cheap, and being offered for free in a lot of cases. Why not make this happen?

If you can put the suggestion forward, please do. I'm sure many of us out there would appreciate it.