Sims saving to onedrive

I want to add a serious example of how The Sims 4 saving to OneDrive can cause real damage — not just save file issues.

My partner lost access to both her Sims 4 saves and her Outlook email because OneDrive filled up due to the game saving everything (saves, tray, mods) into the synced Documents folder:

C:\Users<name>\OneDrive\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4

Once OneDrive hit its limit, sync failed and files were moved to the Recycle Bin or became “online-only.” Even worse, her email stopped working due to Microsoft services being blocked when OneDrive is full. This was a complete denial of service caused by the game unintentionally bloating a cloud-synced folder.

This wasn't her fault — it's caused by:

• EA forcing Sims to save to a synced system folder
• Microsoft not letting users exclude subfolders like Sims 4 from sync

Users have no control over this unless they dig into symlinks or disable OneDrive entirely, which isn’t acceptable for casual players.

EA: Please consider supporting a custom save/mods folder, or at least warn players if they’re saving into a OneDrive-synced location.

This issue deserves escalation — it doesn’t just affect game progress, it affects access to essential services like email.

96fbde9ef3ecb767​  I'd like to note that from EA's end at least, Sims 4 predates Windows 10 and therefore the default OneDrive tie-in that Microsoft likes to push.  And that "encouragement" didn't exist as such initially; it was much simpler to create a local account and therefore not have Documents syncing even a few years ago.  So the fact that Sims 4 has always saved data to Documents, not to mention Sims 3, wasn't an issue when that decision was made.

Sims 4 doesn't choose the exact location to save data either.  It uses the variable %Documents% , which means it follows the Windows setting for the current user profile's Documents directory, whatever that happens to be.  And plenty of other games do this too.  It makes a lot of sense for games that wanted user data easily available to players, for modding or backing up saves or similar; or at least it did until OneDrive became so aggressive.

As for allowing a custom location, the major drawbacks of that are that players could forget the location they chose, or they could choose a protected location or one that's subject to changes from other sources.  That might not be as common as OneDrive-related issues, but it's certainly very possible given other choices players make.  And at least with the current setup, we all know where the data is supposed to be in case something goes wrong.

Maxis may make different choices in the future though.  The legacy version of Sims 1 writes save data to Users > username > Saved Games, like many other newer games do, which is also accessible and has the advantage of not being synced.  But just imagine what would happen if Sims 4 suddenly tried to start using that location.  It would be utter chaos for months.

To fix this issue, you don't need to disable OneDrive or create a symlink.  If you can't exclude a subfolder from syncing (and I could the last time I checked, but admittedly that was a while ago), you can exclude all of Documents.  Or you can move the location of the Documents directory, letting OneDrive sync whatever you manually place in its Documents folder, but keeping Sims 4 data elsewhere.