Backup that… console!?

I recently took my PS3 over to my parents along with the whole Rock Band get up to play with my family on Christmas Eve. Everyone had a great time playing, but I couldn’t get any video or sound from the system when I got home! I was very frustrated, but Google and the PS3 manual came to the rescue with a solution.

Unfortunately, the solution ended with me having to restart the PS3 from scratch. This meant all my save games were lost forever! I’ve decided that I’ll backup my system if I ever move it around again and luckily Sony has made this process simple enough. You can see their support page on the Backup Utility for all the details. This obviously could have happened when you had the old Memory cards on PS or PS2 as well, but it seemed that I was more likely to forget those somewhere rather than have them crash. This generation of gaming hardware has just advanced to such a point where it’s clear that these are full fledged computers and not just toys anymore.

I’d be very happy if there was some way Sony would add a backup to PSN feature so I could simply upload all my game data to a server and be done with it with a single tap of the X button. Afterall, I can always redownload anything from PSN that I have before. I’m mostly concerned with the saved games here.

I found this procedure for backing up the hard drive for an Xbox 360 and it seems like much more of a hack than a supported process. What’s the deal with that Microsoft?

Jeff