Do you know how to do this?

I am making a backup of the "DefaultUser" directory which is located here:
%AppData%\HelloGames\NMS

Now when I unpack older game saves the game doesn't see them. Only the latest one is visible. I'm afraid I'll lose hundreds of hours of game play when I want to play on another computer.

EDIT: Gross conceptual error - I copied and pasted old backup instructions and those would not help you so I deleted those notes.

When backing up the files are you also capturing all of the .hg files? The files in the format save.hg and mf_save.hg have numbers corresponding to the save slot if you have saved progress during the various expeditions so you would need those as well.

You will probably need the accountdata.hg and mf_accountdata.hg files as well.

Another file to backup is GOG Games\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS\TKGRAPHICSSETTINGS.MXML. This has contained some of your key bindings, etc.

Good Luck

I just tested the below on my save from week 1 (I started and stopped a couple times while getting a fell for the game back in 2016):

I am manually backing up the save files to a new folder on a different drive.

I copied and pasted the entire folder from \Users\????\AppData\Roaming\HelloGames\NMS\DefaultUser to this backup drive.

Then I deleted all save related files except for save.hg, mf_save.hg, save2.hg and mf_save2.hg keeping the accountdata.hg and mf_accountdata.hg.

Launched the game and the only save listed was this week 1 save (both automatic and restore point saves).

I then restored the deleted saves and all of those saves were back.

If you were backing up the entire default user file then you should be good to copy that to a new machine or recover a corrupted save, etc.

The cache file saves a lot of the screenshots plus three non-dds files that seem to be part of the expeditions redux. You can delete the .dds files and the only impact will be not having the screenshot appear when visiting past bases, waypoints, etc. If the .dds files are backed up at the same time as backing up the save files then those can be restored as well and nothing changes if you restore the entire DefaultUser folder.

Good Luck

Thanks for the answer.

It turned out that when unpacking the DefaultUser directory appeared twice, so the save path was incorrect and the game did not see these files. It's strange because I was sure I had checked it twice.