Back Up Your Xbox Screenshots and Videos Before Microsoft Deletes Them All

Microsoft won’t let you permanently store your game clips and screenshots on the Xbox Network anymore. In a blog post, the company has announced it’ll start deleting all of these game captures 90 days after you upload them. If you’re as emotionally attached to your “play of the game” moments as I am, you should start backing them up elsewhere ASAP.

How to back up your Xbox screenshots and game clips via your console

You can back up your Xbox game captures to an external drive or upload them to OneDrive. To do this on your Xbox, press the Xbox button on your controller and navigate to My games & apps > See all > Apps > Captures. On this page, you can hit the Manage button and select all captures. After, you can select Upload to OneDrive to store them on the cloud. For most people, this is a good option as long as you have enough free space on OneDrive. If you have a free account, you have 5GB of storage.

Alternatively, plug in an external hard drive or a USB thumb drive to your Xbox. Then, select all of the captures and choose the Copy to external drive option to back them up to the external or USB drive.

You can also choose to delete these captures if you don’t need them. To do so, simply select as many of the captures as you’d like to remove and select Delete.

Upload new game captures to an external drive

For those who can’t be bothered with constantly backing up their game captures manually, the best alternative is to record them directly to an external drive. Microsoft recommends using a USB 3.0 or faster drive for this purpose, since you want something that can keep up with live recording.

When the drive is plugged in, press the Xbox button on the controller and navigate to Profile & system > Settings > System > Storage. Now, pick your external drive on this page and choose Set as capture location. Keep the drive plugged in as long as the console is running; the next time you take a screenshot or game clip, your Xbox will directly save it to the external drive.

Back up Xbox game captures from your PC

If your primary gaming device is your PC, you can press Windows + G to launch Windows Game Bar. Go to the Widgets menu and click Gallery. Select any of your screenshots or game clips from this page and click Open file location.

This action will take you to where all of your game captures are saved. You can quickly copy these files to your backup drive or upload them to the cloud storage service of your choice.