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There's one thing that you really need to know about me: I worry – a lot. For as long as I can remember, I've had irrational reactions to almost everything in my life: did I just put my modest size eight shoes in my mouth? Did I just get that exam question wrong – even though I've triple checked it twice? Have I mucked up my Bloodborne playthrough because that wheelchair dude from the Hunter's Dream has vanished from my game? You get the idea; when there's nothing to worry about, I worry about that.

For someone as irritatingly uptight as me, then, cloud storage took a real weight off my mind. Previously, I was always terrified that I was going to lose years of save files on my PlayStation 3 – but knowing that I could copy all of them to the cloud when the feature eventually arrived put my mind at rest. I uploaded everything – around five years' worth of data – and breathed a sigh of relief once it was stored on Sony's servers. No hardware failure could ever take away my progress after that – well, barring a huge disaster at PlayStation HQ. Yeah, that was still a worry.

The point is that I've come to rely on PlayStation Plus cloud saves, and I've uploaded hundreds of files from my PS3 and Vita; my PlayStation 4, however, remains a different and frustrating matter.

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It's a strange one: I've uploaded every save from eight years' worth of gaming on my PS3, and I still have a few hundred megabytes of spare space left. Meanwhile, I've only been playing the PS4 for around 18 months, and I've already had to delete items from my 1GB of allocated space because I haven't got enough room left to store more. So, what's going on? Well, a quick look at the system's settings tells me that PS4 files are hilariously bloated: DriveClub's eating up 325MB of storage space on save files alone; Octodad: The Dadliest Catch a further 75MB; SingStar a head scratching 1.08GB.

That's all of my cloud storage space gone and then some – across three games.

Yes, you're right: I only really care about my player progress in all of these titles, and when you strip away all of the bloat files, you're looking at about 40MB of save data between the three. However, that's still an enormous figure compared to the PS3, which could squeeze three or four saves into about 500KB. What's changed? It's not entirely clear – though it is nice to see recent first-party releases like Bloodborne and Super Stardust Ultra plumping up for much more manageable 3MB files.

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But irrespective of reason or future changes, my problem right now remains the same: cloud saves aren't giving me peace of mind anymore – in fact, they're giving me a headache. Sony's new console is great at managing things while in Rest Mode, but almost every time I turn my system on these days, I'm greeted with an 'Upload Failed' error message – and every time I'm out of space. The device makes it simple enough to delete any bloat, but it's still giving me additional work – and, with all that worrying lark, I often ponder whether I've deleted something important.

There's a simple enough solution, of course: just give me more cloud space. I know that I'm already getting a good 3GB across all three of my PlayStation platforms, but this is miniscule when you consider that Amazon offers up 5GB just for having a customer account. I hate to use the lazy Microsoft comparison, but the Xbox One offers unlimited cloud storage space; fair enough the Redmond firm owns and operates its own Azure server farm, but there's no difference in the price between PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold.

I appreciate that this entire article may well come across whiny and entitled; you're free to roast me in the comments for being a worry pot. Do you know what, though? I don't care, because I appreciate the peace of mind that cloud storage enables me, and I want it to be better on the PS4. This isn't a problem that's going to affect everyone, I understand that – but if Sony wants to please all of its customers, then it will at least consider upping the amount of PlayStation Plus cloud storage space. Well, either that, or it could fix the broken saves system so I'm not uploading hundreds of megabytes at a time.

Do you have cloud save anxiety, or is Sammy coming across like a silly billy? Run out of room in the comments section below.

Do you think that Sony should bump up the available cloud space on PS4? (87 votes)

  1. Yes, I’m sick of running out now82%
  2. Hmm, I don’t care10%
  3. No, I’m happy with what I’ve got8%

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