Early Access means your world is more fragile than it will be at 1.0. Launch week has already produced crash rollbacks, and one officially acknowledged bug can leave a save stuck mid-quest. Knowing where your saves live and copying them once in a while is the cheapest insurance you can buy — it costs two minutes.
Where Permafrost keeps its saves
Permafrost uses Steam Cloud saves, and Steam Cloud games store their synced files inside your Steam installation in a predictable place:
[Your Steam folder]\userdata\[Your Account ID]\2254990\remote\
The long number 2254990 is Permafrost’s Steam App ID, so the folder is unambiguous. Your Steam folder is usually C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam, unless you installed it elsewhere (Steam → Settings → Storage shows your library paths).
Finding your Account ID: the userdata folder contains one folder per Steam account that has used this PC. If there is only one, that is you. If there are several, log into steamcommunity.com in a browser — the number in your profile URL is your account ID. Alternatively, sort userdata by date modified and take the most recent one after playing.
remote folder right after a play session — it should contain recently modified save files. Steam also lets you browse cloud saves under Settings → Cloud. We have not confirmed whether the game additionally keeps local-only copies elsewhere; if your userdata folder stays empty after playing, check the conventional fallback location Documents\My Games\ for a Permafrost folder and tell us via the contact page so we can correct this guide.
How to back up your world
- Close the game completely — not paused, not in the background. Transferring files while the game writes to them is how corrupted backups happen.
- Copy the whole folder, not individual files: the entire
remote(or2254990) directory. Your player profile, world state and companion data live together. - Paste it somewhere safe — another drive, a cloud drive, anywhere outside the Steam folder.
- Timestamp it. Rename the copy
Permafrost_Backup_2026-10-14style. Dated backups let you roll back to a point before a specific bug bit you.
A reasonable rhythm during Early Access: back up at the end of every long session, and always before a patch downloads. Patches are exactly when a borderline-broken save gets worse.
How to restore a backup
- Close the game and Steam’s cloud sync can fight you, so first right-click Permafrost → Properties → General → disable Keep games saves in Steam Cloud.
- Navigate back to the save folder and move out (don’t just delete) the current, possibly corrupted files.
- Paste your dated backup into the folder.
- Launch the game and save manually once you are in-world.
- If it loads cleanly, re-enable Steam Cloud. The next cloud sync will adopt your local files.
The move-out step matters. If Steam Cloud had already overwritten your local files with an older version, restoring a backup while cloud sync is still enabled can simply re-corrupt the restore.
Why this matters specifically right now
Two launch-week facts make backups worth the two minutes. First, community reports describe hard crashes rolling progress back to the last autosave — anything you did since the last autosave is simply gone. Second, the studio has acknowledged a bug where picking up a recording during a quest can leave a save stuck, with the promised fix still pending as of 14 October 2026. Neither is catastrophic if yesterday’s save is sitting in a backup folder. See our crash-fix guide and known issues tracker for the current state.
Data version 2026.10.12 · reviewed 12 October 2026. Compiled 14 October 2026. If the save location differs on your install, tell us — this page is verified against the standard Steam Cloud layout, not against every PC configuration.