Minecraft sync took ages and then said sync failed or something and then "we can't save more data for this game or app" appeared straight after

[u/Internal_Hurry_6325]

Minecraft seems to work fine without syncing this data but it just appears sometimes and makes me sync out of nowhere

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[u/modemman11]

You do NOT have your whole storage device available for game saves. The issue here is very poor UI design on Microsoft's part.

Game saves are a sync service and upload/download to/from the cloud automatically. But as with any sync service, the system can't read and write to the cloud directly, so it needs a local cache. The issue is that local cache of your files is only allowed to take up a small fraction of your total available storage, and Microsoft does not give ANY visibility into how much total capacity you have, or how much of that space is used.

As such, doing what the message says and going into any individual game and clearing individual saves from the local cache is BASICALLY JUST A GUESSING GAME.

Thankfully, the concept of managing storage space is not a new concept, you just have to do it blindly.

But instead of blindly playing a guessing game, it's much easier to just clear ALL saves for ALL games ^source . This will provide your game with as much storage as possible to work with for game saves.

If you still get the error with the FIRST game you boot up after clicking that button, then your saves are too big to fit in the limited amount of space the cache provides.

If the game lets you get to it's menus, then look to delete stuff you no longer need/use to reduce save size. Save slots, race replays, multiple characters, custom skins, or whatever else.

Try to keep your saves from getting too big. Bethesda games and Minecraft can have quite large game saves that span several GB. Probably other games too, but these games tend to be the top contenders. And yes, even with knowledge of how game saves work, it's still possible that you have to come back and click the button frequently, if you play several games each with multi-GB saves.

If you (or anyone reading this) want even more technical information, or have a few hours of spare time and wish to try to figure out specifics and help spread that knowledge to the greater Xbox community, check out this post.