Back up your Xbox game captures before it’s too late

Microsoft has announced that PC and Xbox game captures stored on the Xbox Live Network will soon have a rolling expiration date.

Starting January 2024, everything that’s stored on your Xbox Live Network, be it gameplay videos or screenshots, will be deleted after 90 days. To avoid losing years of content, Microsoft is giving you two ways to back up your clips and screenshots: to the cloud via OneDrive or to a physical drive.

It’s very unfortunate, especially with such a short duration. 90 days is nothing when it comes to fun memories shared with friends.

Any USB drive you plan to use must be formatted in NTFS before you can start storing. You also can’t use the same drive your games are installed on since it’s formatted differently.

To backup your screenshots and videos, follow the steps below:

Back up Xbox game captures on PC

1. Press the Windows logo key + G on your keyboard to open the Game Bar.
2. In the Widgets menu, select Gallery.
3. Select a capture and then click on Open file location. This will open the Captures folder on your drive.
4. Save the captures you care about, though as long as you don’t reinstall Windows, your files should stay there.

Back up game captures on Xbox

1. Press the Xbox button.
2. Go to My games & apps > See all > Apps > Captures.
3. You may be faced with a screen saying “We’re changing how we store captures…” > click on Tell me more > then press Continue.
4. On the next page, Microsoft will offer you a one-month trial for OneDrive, adding 100GB to your storage capacity – the free tier only has 5GB, so you can claim it if you fancy. You should be able to take advantage of this offer later.
5. Next, you will be asked where to store your captures.
6. If you have a USB stick or an external drive, select Copy to external storage, but if you want to use OneDrive, then choose Copy to OneDrive.
7. Pick the captures you want to backup and click Copy > then Upload.

If you don’t have the option to select captures, click on Manage on the top right. Also, when you select one or more captures, the available options may change based on the type of content.

Keep in mind that depending on the number of recordings you have and on the speed of your internet connection, upload may take a long time to finish.

Lastly, Make sure to have the automatic upload option checked to save any new captures into your OneDrive cloud storage directly.