Safe to Run Games From External Drive Long Term?

I'm not entirely positive about the moving of Save States to an external drive or USB stick, but that would be nice! I would say, yes, the 500 GB drive will be more than ample for your game saves since you're installing to an external drive - I think they
take up KB of space rather than MB, I think the biggest save game I've seen was around 240 KB. As for the backup, I completely understand the nervousness about losing saves in the cloud, and actually, what you mention is how it currently works - you have your
Cloud save, but you also have your local save, simultaneously. That way, if your network ever goes down, you will still have access to the save state directly on the console. Then, the next time you connect to the network and play the game, you will get a
prompt from live saying "The local save is more recent than the one stored in the cloud" and you will get to pick which save you want to use as your official one, at which point the cloud and console will sync up.

Hope this makes sense! I know with the advent of Cloud storage and Cloud processing, things have gotten a bit less cut-and-dried!

also, are there plans in a future update to let us back up our game saves to a USB stick or external drive?

guess I don't fully trust the Cloud and would prefer if we could create a local backup of game saves as well.

All game saves are actually stored on the Cloud for easy access on any console.

oh, and a follow up question about this.

if I set an external drive as my primary storage, where do all of my local game saves get stored?

are my game saves stored on the external drive, too? or are they still saved on the internal drive?

thanks, Jaymo! I really appreciate your help!