How to prevent lost saves

[CaptainNebulous]

I'm actually surprised people haven't caught onto this yet. It's been an increasing issue since around Spring of 2018. There is two increasingly common reasons for lost save progress :

1) Basically most of the anti-virus companies have abandoned the concept of avoiding false positives with many types of dynamic files. What this means is unless you add every game's folder, and its respective save folder which is usually in the documents folder.... all AV software, including windows defender, bit defender, AVG, Avast, and Norton will delete or reset your save file.... thinking it is a malicious file. This has been a problem in numerous other games in the past year or two. Furthermore, even though in theory you should see a notification when this happens... what I am finding is that many times there is no notification. An alternative to adding the game folders to the exceptions list is simply disabling the AV while you play. BTW if you're thinking "well then the anti-virus companies need to fix this problem," yeah good luck with that. Won't happen for a while, at least, if ever.

2) Steam cloud never worked very well, except for games that it.... well... did. It is possible that you may need to disable steam cloud for the game in order to prevent save file conflicts and corruptions. However this is a bit less likely than the dreaded AV deleting save files problem.

Extra Tidbit : For some reason many modern games are converting to a save file structure that is extra sensitive to hard crashes or power outages. If your PC has a hard crash, or you have a power outage - mid game - there is a chance (depending on the game, it could be a 100% chance) that your save will be corrupt. I have no idea why they are slowly migrating to such a sensitive file structure.

[Moosemedford]

Good information. Certainly an issue I have struggled with. I’ll add the following:

(1) though I concede that my reported issues could be an AV problem, I have no evidence whatsoever of that, including my AV log files. Not saying you’re wrong - just that I have zero evidence to support;

(2) I don’t use Steam Cloud. I can play the game completely offline and still have the problem.

I agree with you that their save file strategy appears to be extremely delicate, and that any error (be it game fault or system fault) can cause you to lose your save.

The first time I lost my save, I had no copy. Was completely SOL. Encountered a BSOD while playing.

I started keeping one backup of my save directory. The second time I lost my save, I also encountered a BSOD while playing. When my system came back up, my time stamp on the save was 2 minutes prior to my BSOD, so I figured the save files were good. I foolishly copied the game save files over my backup. Started game and got the “welcome” menu - meaning that my save was corrupted and now was my backup.

I now keep three different copies of the save directory. Every so often, I exit the game and copy the save directory to one of my three (overwriting the oldest) then launch and get back to playing. I started doing this about a week ago now. I have had the game crash several times since. Sometimes the game itself crashes. Sometimes a BSOD. The data loss has been minimal.

My recommendation to anyone concerned about this - keep multiple backups going.

Hope this helps.

[CaptainNebulous]

Originally posted by Moosealbany:

Good information. Certainly an issue I have struggled with. I’ll add the following:

(1) though I concede that my reported issues could be an AV problem, I have no evidence whatsoever of that, including my AV log files. Not saying you’re wrong - just that I have zero evidence to support;

(2) I don’t use Steam Cloud. I can play the game completely offline and still have the problem.

I agree with you that their save file strategy appears to be extremely delicate, and that any error (be it game fault or system fault) can cause you to lose your save.

The first time I lost my save, I had no copy. Was completely SOL. Encountered a BSOD while playing.

I started keeping one backup of my save directory. The second time I lost my save, I also encountered a BSOD while playing. When my system came back up, my time stamp on the save was 2 minutes prior to my BSOD, so I figured the save files were good. I foolishly copied the game save files over my backup. Started game and got the “welcome” menu - meaning that my save was corrupted and now was my backup.

I now keep three different copies of the save directory. Every so often, I exit the game and copy the save directory to one of my three (overwriting the oldest) then launch and get back to playing. I started doing this about a week ago now. I have had the game crash several times since. Sometimes the game itself crashes. Sometimes a BSOD. The data loss has been minimal.

My recommendation to anyone concerned about this - keep multiple backups going.

Hope this helps.

As dumb as this sounds, you won't always get a log entry when an AV takes action. It depends on how "passive" it thinks its correction is. But I'm not saying you are wrong or anything, this might not be the case for you. I'd still recommend testing it out.

On the bright side since the game runs in Unity, it is most likely coded in C# so there is probably numerous people who could simply write a custom script to force the game to save backups automatically. I have yet to investigate it to that end yet. Depending on how the developers copyright the rights to their files, this may or may not technically be illegal... but who cares lol.

[Vlad Tepes]

Thanks CaptainNebulus. .. good information.

I never use AV software, (only the default Windows defender) and have never had issues for 20 some years....
I do as MooseAlbany does, and I keep a backup after every race. (or each time I exit the game.)

So far (knock on wood) I have not had any issues/crashes/lost saves.. so I haven't had to restore anything.. but.. who knows someday.

Yes it would be nice if someone could write some script to do as you suggest.. I don't know how active the modding community is with this game, and it is beyond my abilities :)

[CaptainNebulous]

Originally posted by voltaj:

Thanks CaptainNebulus. .. good information.

I never use AV software, (only the default Windows defender) and have never had issues for 20 some years....
I do as MooseAlbany does, and I keep a backup after every race. (or each time I exit the game.)

So far (knock on wood) I have not had any issues/crashes/lost saves.. so I haven't had to restore anything.. but.. who knows someday.

Yes it would be nice if someone could write some script to do as you suggest.. I don't know how active the modding community is with this game, and it is beyond my abilities :)

Windows Defender IS an AV.... in fact even when you have a third party AV installed, it is now integrated with Defender and then you sort of have a hybrid of two AV lol. MS has made things weird.

[Vlad Tepes]

I understand.. I just meant that I don't add any extra AV, I just let the Windows default work, and I've never had issues.. as long as I stay away from naughty web sites lol.