Microsoft’s policy regarding in-game captures goes into effect this month, meaning that users need to hurry up and make sure that they’ve backed-up all of their favorite videos and screenshots. As reported by ComicBook.com, it seems that users risk losing that data if they don’t get it offloaded to an external location before the mass deletion commences.
The basic gist of it is that users need to get the stuff that they want to save onto either OneDrive or an external hard drive within 90 days of capturing it. This policy has been in effect sice October 2023, but is only now about to be fully implemented. So anything you’ve captured since getting your Xbox Series X|S is now at risk of being permanently deleted, and anything you capture moving forward will be automatically deleted after 90 days moving forward. Saving stuff to the system’s internal hard drive will not prevent the deletion either; it’s OneDrive/external HDD or nothing.
This kind of move shouldn’t be terribly surprising since it would be in Microsoft’s best interest to host as little data on Xbox servers as possible. Why exactly this requires deleting from users’ own internal HDDs is a little beyond me, but I get why the company would want to continually clean up its servers. It’s really a shame that they’re taking it as far as reaching into local devices though as that’s a step that shouldn’t be necessary.
Heck, I could dig out my old Xbox 360 right now and watch everything I’ve saved on there right now if I want. The data is right there, as is the capability to view it, so why isn’t the same true of the more advanced Xbox Series consoles? Really, it seems like the further we go into the future, the less usable stuff becomes. Like, what does all this extra online functionality actually do for us? Not all that much, it seems. All it ever seems to do across all businesses is make life harder in ways it wasn’t before. This is just another example of that.
What do you think of this though? Is it a reasonable move by Microsoft? What do think of all this extra stuff getting crammed into things these days?
Image was a promotional image for Xbox
VIRTUAL BASTION 
I don’t think this is actually anything new. When I played A Plague Tale: Requiem, I recorded literally hundreds of Photo Mode screenshots locally, but when I finished the game they were all deleted, and that was within a week or so max. There was no warning on the deletion, it just happened in the background and was really disappointing.
From looking online at the time (Jan 2024), it was a widespread occurrence that if you didn’t save them to OneDrive, the Xbox would often randomly delete them. I am glad that they are at least telling people officially now I suppose.
Either way, if you want to keep them safe, always upload your screenshots online too! 🙂
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It’s so strange that they go so far as to delete them locally. You’d think it’d benough to just disable automatic upload or clear the ones that are hosted server-side. Sucks that you lost all your captures though, man. Where you able to salvage anything at all?
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Yeah, I turned off the Xbox Live upload as the double-notifications were bothering me, but that turned out to be the wrong call! Sadly I lost them all at the time. Lesson learned though, I’ll always back up Xbox captures in future. 🙂
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