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I'd like to track achievements and access cloud saves tied to my Xbox live account. Id like to do this from a friends Xbox. Ive read the best way to do this is to recover the gamer tag.

If I recover my gamer tag on a friends Xbox, what will happen when I go to sign back home on my Xbox?

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Not posting this as an answer, since it isn't what you asked, but recovering your gamertag definitely isn't the easiest (or best IMO) option these days. You should be able to download your roaming profile to any other console: video and support link. You don't have to hassle with recovering and possible missing achievements, etc. – Doozer Blake Jan 5 '12 at 20:39
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@DoozerBlake That may not be a direct answer to the question but it does seem to be the better solution to the overall drive behind the question, putting your profile on a friends system. – James Jan 5 '12 at 21:30

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When you recover your gamertag, what you're doing is copying the current status of your gamertag from Microsoft's servers to the console where you're recovering it (your gamerscore and achievements).

Often, this will give you the information you wanted to restore, but keep in mind that what you are recovering is your gamerscore and achievements from the last time you were online. You will not get credit for any achievements you got offline if you did not sync them by going back online on that console prior to recovering your gamertag on your console. (The same will be true for cloud saves: you have to save your game back to the cloud in order to access it from another console.)

As James mentions, and as this question points out, you can easily move your profile back and forth between consoles by saving it to a USB stick (or to a memory card, if you both have older 360s that accept them). You would not need to recover your profile each time, and if USB slots are a problem (if you're playing a game that uses several of them), you can move your profile to the hard drive of the console you're playing on, and before you leave, you can move it back to your USB stick.

If you do that, keep in mind that profile and local save games are not necessarily saved in the same place. If you want to take your saves with you, you need to save them in the cloud or on the USB stick.

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The main issue when recovering a gamer tag is that loss of your save data. The internet is peppered with people saying that this does happen that this does not happen. Wherever you read that this was the best way to get your tag on a friends system is however wrong.

Get a memory card or a simple USB stick and use that to put your gamer tag/profile on it and take that with you to your friend's house. Plug it in and you can sign on normally and everything associated with your profile is there. Your achievements, access to any games you have unlocked, etc.

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Can you provide some additional info on moving gamer tag to USB stick? – Nate Jan 5 '12 at 19:28
The USB stick would probably have to be formatted in a certain way in order to save the gamertag on it. You could do this or get a microsoft memory card and put it on there. I would just recover from the friends xbox though to save money. – Emerica. Jan 5 '12 at 19:30
@Emerica, this question explains it in detail. – Dave DuPlantis Jan 5 '12 at 19:42
@NateBross I bought a 64GB memory stick from Amazon while it was on sale for a very nice price, I went into the the system and memory menu on the 360 and selected to use the device, it let me tell it how much space it was to use (selected 16GB cause I also just carry XBL games around on it) and poof, it was done. – James Jan 5 '12 at 20:34
@Emerica. Remember you will be doing multiple recoveries, one to move it to your friends and one to move it back to yours. Your profile can only exist on a single memory storage device at a time, which is why a USB or Memory card is the easiest way to do this. – James Jan 5 '12 at 20:35
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You will not lose any saved data of any kind. If you recover your gamertag at someone elses house you will just have to RE-Recover it from your xbox again when you return home. This process can be tedious becasue you have to enter your username and password again, but it will not delete any data at all. I have recovered 100's of times to play Left 4 dead and other titles at friends houses.

As for cloud saving I am not sure if you can acess your cloud storage this way but my guess would say yes.

Also achievments will defintley transfer back and forth between recovers.

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