How to Troubleshoot Steam Synchronization Issues

by Rian

This isn’t the solution that will fix all synchronizations on Steam platform. Instead, I decided to keep it as a documentation purpose, as most of the posts and articles I could find on the subject hardly touched on it. If you are seeing “Unable to sync” on the Steam client for all games, you are on the same boat as I was.

In my case, it happened on a 2019 Mac Pro, a workstation wired back to back to the router. It becomes important later, as most articles insinuated using Ethernet instead of WiFi for reliability as part of the checklist. I jumped the part asking to test out current network setup as most other services running over the network were fine. Even from Steam itself, downloading a game from the library went without a hitch.

There are myriad list of methods people share online as to what could work: turning off and on the cloud settings, change the location to US – LA, deleting possibly corrupted save files, and etc. None of them worked long enough in my case. So I started digging into Steam’s log files. Here is the link to Steam Support document on where it is located. I could see that Steam had failed during HTTP upload to the cloud, but not much else. Steam could use some updates for more verbose logging and possible resume feature during the save file upload process, but those are beside the point.

The problem was the Ethernet. Ethernet is not bullet-proof as many documentations suggest. In fact, I’ve learnt it the hard way the physical medium had little to no safeguards for fault tolerances. As far as I could tell, consumer-grade equipments and softwares can’t compensate for Ethernet faults at all, much like Steam’s cloud services. Even the documentations suggested moving closer to the router for better WiFi signal or connecting via Ethernet, not double checking your ports and cables for its integrity.

The way I tested —aside from the fact that I was already in the processing of weeding out old Ethernet cables— my cables was simple: the same Steam client on the same workstation did not have any problems whilst connected over WiFi, instead of Ethernet. If you are having troubles uploading to the Steam cloud, double check your wired connection — it may be the unforeseen choke point. And as I have written on the previous post, Ethernet also has a lifespan; considering average consumers are expected to replace or upgrade their network equipments and computers every 6 years or so, your Ethernet cable that has not been cared for last decade may perform worse than the wireless counterpart.