A General PS3 Question From A Newbie

So... I admit, I haven't been a big gamer the last few years and the last system I purchased was a PS2 (which I still use).

I played some games on a buddy's PS3 but only recently was able to acquire one of my own and then suddenly realized: My game saves are on his system. I understand that you can transfer some files via an ethernet cable or using a thumb drive but not all files transfer? Is that true? Is there a more efficient way to transfer files or has Sony truly done away with memory cards?

Are there any thumb drives that work better than others to use as a de facto memory card?

Obviously, I'm late to the party.

Take care all.

You can transfer save files, but far from all of them will work on a different system. Many games lock save files to one particular user account on one particular system, making it impossible to directly transfer, or even back up your own save files to an usb device in case of a system failure. I can only make an educated guess as to why this is done, but I'm thinking it is because developers don't want to let people "cheat" to gain PSN trophies.

For these games, the only way to transfer them is to subscribe to to playstation plus, and use the cloud save feature on two different consoles. I'm not sure how this would work if you played the game while logged in to an account with a different PSN account than the one you plan on using on your own console.

I don't have a complete list, but I know at least a dozen of my PS3 games did not allow me to perform my own local backups or transfers to another system.

Due to the way PS3 saves games (encrypted and linked to the system/account) it will probably not be possible unfortunately.

They're all encrypted on the HDD, but the OS can write them to an USB drive unencrypted. As I said, many save files are locked to a particular system and account, but not all are.

It is still very possible for any and all games through the use of PS+ cloud saves, as long as the same PS+ account is used on both systems.

That's probably how I would do it. Just spend $10 on a month of PS+ for the buddy, have him upload the saves to the cloud. Log into his account on your system, re-acquire the saves, and beat those games on his account. You can probably go about your life doing that if he doesn't mind sharing his account. My girlfriend and her best friend shared an account through most of PS3's life so that whenever they bought a game digitally they could both download it if the other wanted to

Personally, I prefer to have my own account, so if you have to resort to that method, I'd just use his account for those games and play anything new on your own personal account, but it's up to you. Sony doesn't really care if 2 people are on the same account at the same time, as long as you're not both trying to play a game online at the same time. At least, that's the impression I've gotten. It's been a few years since my girlfriend and her friend were still doing the shared account thing, so it may have changed. I have 3 Sony consoles that regularly have me logged in at the same time and they don't argue with each other. But they are not the same system types, so that could be a factor

Thanks for the info everyone!

Take care all.