You finally hit the water temple on your commute handheld. You get home, pick up your couch device, and... you're back at the ranch. Three hours gone.
If you own more than one retro handheld, you've lived some version of this. And if you've spent any time on r/SBCGaming or the handheld Discords, you already know the community's duct-tape answer: Syncthing, a folder share, maybe a cron job and a prayer.
We built Klyport because that answer is wrong. Not "inconvenient" wrong — dangerous to your saves wrong. Here's why, and what we did differently.
// The problem isn't syncing files. It's syncing the right version of files.
General-purpose sync tools treat your .srm files like any other document. They look at modification times and "last writer wins."
But handhelds are uniquely hostile to that model:
- Clock skew is everywhere. Cheap handhelds lose their clock when the battery dies, boot with the wrong date, or never had a battery-backed RTC at all. A save written today can carry a timestamp from 2021. "Newest file wins" becomes "random file wins."
- You genuinely play the same game on two devices. That's the whole point of owning multiple handhelds. Two-way edits to the same file are the normal case, not an edge case — and naive sync resolves that by silently destroying one side.
- Saves are small and overwrites are instant. There's no "are you sure?" moment. By the time you notice, the losing save is gone, and so is your conflict window.
This isn't theoretical. Respected voices in the community — Retro Game Corps among them — have warned for years against trusting general-purpose sync tools with save files you actually care about, precisely because of silent overwrites. [Link to the relevant RGC guide/video here.]
The hard part of save sync was never moving bytes over the LAN. It's knowing which save is the truth — and refusing to guess when you can't know.
// How Klyport handles it: hashes, baselines, and a refusal to guess
Klyport tracks every save by content hash, per device, against a recorded baseline — the last state both sides agreed on. Every sync, each save lands in exactly one of three states:
- In sync — hashes match. Nothing happens.
- Fast-forward — one side changed since the last sync, the other didn't. The changed side wins. This is the safe, unambiguous case, and it's most of what a sync does.
- Conflict — both sides changed since the baseline. Klyport does not pick a winner. Ever.
Notice what's not in that list: modification times as the source of truth. Hashes don't care what your handheld thinks the date is.
When there is a conflict, you get a real decision, not a coin flip: keep the device's version, keep your PC's version, or — our favorite — keep both. "Keep both" writes the losing save alongside the winner with a clear conflict suffix, so even a wrong choice loses you nothing. Progress is never the price of a sync.
// You see the plan before anything moves
[IMAGE 2] — Close-up mockup of Klyport's dry-run preview modal: a list of saves with badges "PULL", "PUSH", "CONFLICT", a summary line at the top ("4 pull · 2 push · 1 conflict"), and a prominent Confirm button. Dark HUD-style UI.
Every sync starts as a dry run. Before a single byte is written, Klyport shows you exactly what it intends to do: what's coming home from the device, what's going out to it, and what's conflicted. You confirm; then it executes precisely that plan — nothing more.
And every write — push, pull, conflict copy — lands in an append-only audit log with before/after hashes. If you ever wonder "what happened to that save?", the answer is on record, not lost to a sync daemon's memory.
This is the standard we hold every Klyport feature to: a tool that moves your real files has no business doing anything silently. No silent overwrites. No silent deletes. No silent "trust me."
// What this costs you: nothing
Save sync is the reason Klyport exists, so it's in the free tier — Operator:
- Bidirectional save and save-state sync over your LAN
- Your PC plus 2 handhelds
- Full conflict detection, "keep both", dry-run previews, and the audit log
That last line matters. Dry-run, conflict handling, and the audit log are never paywalled, on any tier. Safety isn't an upsell.
Paid tiers exist for scale and convenience — unlimited devices, scheduled syncs, cross-source library views — not for the right to not lose your saves. (You can read the full breakdown on the pricing page →.)
// What's next
Save sync is the wedge, not the whole product. Klyport also unifies your Steam, PlayStation, and console libraries with your ROM collection in one panel, and turns "load up my handheld for the weekend" into a one-click mirror with a dry-run diff. We'll dig into those flows in upcoming posts.
But it starts here, because this is the pain that made us build it: you should never lose a save again because two devices disagreed about a timestamp.
Try it
Klyport is free to download for [macOS and Windows →]. Connect your PC and a handheld over your LAN, run your first dry-run sync, and see exactly what it would do before it does anything.
Discussion prompt for the comments / Discord: What's your worst lost-save story — and what was your sync setup when it happened? We're collecting these (the patterns are depressingly consistent) and they directly shape what we harden next. [Join the Discord →]
Klyport syncs your saves and save-states — never ROMs through our servers, never your library catalogued in our cloud. Your collection stays yours, on your hardware.