I have actually a silly question, but where does your trophies being saved? Into your harddisk or to a Sony's server?

My brother-in-law did a format and lost his GTA IV trophies though.

Another question may arise, that how you can make a completely backup of your PS3 HD (I normally copy my save games to a USB stick for backup), including trophies possibly?
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I think the trophies are saved on a server, because the first thing the PS3 does when you add a new HDD, is synchronizing your trophies.
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I also think the same because when you go to look at your trophies the PS3 has to sync them before they are shown, and the same if you compared them with a friends trophies. Could be wrong though. It might save them to both the network and locally. It definitely has to save them to the network though, otherwise how would anyone else in your friends list be able to compare them when you are offline?
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If they're saved on your hard disk and then synced to the server, what's to stop you hacking the files for better results and then syncing it up to the server?
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There probably isn't if you knew how. No software will ever be 100% secure or fool proof and will always eventually be able to be hacked.
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There are trophy hacks existing, even PC applications to deal with them, never tried though, I don't see the point.
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It depends. For me, I want just one trophy for PES 2011 to get the Platinum, and that's the online trophy which is very tricky (win 15/20 matches online). That's suxx really.

I believe too, that trophys are saved into a server, but thenm why my brother-in-law's GTA IV trophies went busted? Strange enough.
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Maybe they just got messed up with the recent PSN server issues?

I also don't personally see the point in hacking trophies as there wouldn't be much point in them if you did. Obviously if having a certain one unlocks something in a game that could be a little different, but mostly when they just represent achievements in the games I don't see the point.
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As for where the trophies are saved I can answer pretty clearly that they are stored locally until you do the trophy syncronisation thing. Because as "luck" will have it, my internal PS3 HD crashed a little while ago. I recently got a new one in there, and when I looked at the trophy list (after a syncronisation that took ages) most trophies were still there. Except for the ones I'd recently earned playing L.A. Noire, I'd gotten about halfway through it but the trophies I'd earned up to that point were no longer there as they had never been syncronised with the server.
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I wonder now if my trophies ever get synchronized because I'm never online anymore

And I have quite many at the moment
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