Steam Deck deleted my progress and items from level 7 to Level 11

[BigWally]

I played Plate Up for 96 hours, had a half full garage, and was on Level 11. I played it on the Steam Deck for the first time and strangely noticed I was only on Level 7 there, but didn't see any way to synchronize or update it. I opened Plate Up on my PC this morning and my progress is GONE. All my items are gone. I presume my level is gone as well. I searched and found this happens on the Steam Deck for other games, too. How do you prevent this from happening? How do you back up progress on games? Most importantly, how do I restore my progress?

[什么都干只会害了我]

Normally i should suggest you ask for help through official support.

However, if you'd like to mess with the save files (at your own risk), i can provide some info for your reference.

The following info was based on game version 1.0.5(294C) , since it's 1.1.0(B245) now after the halloween update, not sure if save system has changed.

1. The game do keep some(<= N) recent save files for you, though it's not shown in the game UI. You can find them at C:\Users\%YOUR_USER_NAME%\AppData\LocalLow\It's Happening\PlateUp\ . Here we got 3 type of save folders, Full/Progress/Profile . Save files in those folder are named using unix timestamp which indicates the save time.

Full - As it says, it's the full backup for all the game progress. This folder can be empty if you can NOT see the 'Recover Save' item in the lobby, which means you do NOT have a interrupted (e.g. quit the game during the run) halfway run to be continued. The `Full` save has highest priority, and will be used if it's NOT empty.

Progress - If the `Full` folder is empty, then `Progress` folder is used to restore game progress. `Progress` keep things like lvl/exp, garage items, franchise info, etc. So baisically, `Full` = `Progress` + `Halfway run`(what the 'Recover Save' does)

Profile - Player's profile settings, like name, keybindings, etc. Unrelated to the game progress, just ignore it.

2. Based on the info given above, you could recover(rollback) your save file, if it's not too late , since those file is limited to a maximum of N ( N = 10 or what, idk) while auto-save is triggered frequently during a run.

Before you do some experiments, i would suggest backup ALL the save files first. The game would read & use the most recent save file when you "login" your profile, that is, the file named with largest timestamp. If you sort those files by name in increasing order, the last one should be the most recent one.

So you can find your "restore point" quickly according to the save time (which is the file name), and file create/mod time (which is more intuitive & readable). OR, with enough patience, you could delete the most recent save once at a time, then re-launch the game to confirm if that's the one your are looking for. (Don't forget to turn off Steam clouding saving for PlateUp before mess with save files, when you are done, you can turn it back on).

3, If you are lucky, you may have restore your save file. If not, there might be some other ways. Try use other people's save (since Progress is not linked to Profile, so i guess it's not bind to specific user/machine, but i'm not sure if it works). Or try modify the save file directly if you have experience with hex editor, I'm kinda familiar with the `Progress` save file format (precisely, i mean tweak around exp & garage items) if you want some help, and i could help modify the save for you if you'd prefer.

4. After everything back to it was, i would recommend backup your save regularly while you still using Steam Deck.

Hope it helps.

[BigWally]

Thank you - your instructions match what finally worked for me. I did contact Steam Support. I updated the ticket to ask how to prevent this in the future too. Here was my response to their response (they told me to "read the Steam cloud FAQ" and "provide more details.")

"I understand how the Steam Cloud works. I played on my PC and I was on Level 11 with a half full garage. I shut Steam down on my PC with the cloud properly synced as usual. 15 minutes later, I opened the game to try playing it for the first time on the Steam Deck, and it wasn't synchronized. It was still at Level 7 with no garage items. I closed Plate Up since there was no point playing it in that state. The next morning when I opened Plate Up on my PC, my progress was back at Level 7 with no garage items.

Either the Steam deck should be fully syncing properly with the cloud, or playing completely off the cloud. It shouldn't open unsynchronized and worse, overwrite the cloud in that state.

After a lot of research, trial and error, and finally asking someone for help, I determined that the *.plateupsave files are saved in several locations and most online instructions pointed me to the wrong location. I noticed that every time I tested it, the cloud was adding 1 new file and deleting an old file, so I could have ended up losing the progress completely. Thankfully, I turned off the cloud, deleted all of the newer files in the correct location (C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\It's Happening\PlateUp\Profile), and I got my progress back. What a pain!

For now, I am keeping the cloud off on my PC and I won't be playing on my brand new Steam Deck. During my research I noticed that this happens with a lot of other games on the Steam Deck. No one is going to want to use the Steam Deck if there's always a risk that many hours of progress are over written.

Although I fixed the issue myself after a ton of research, trial and error, and finally asking someone for help, I would like to know why this happened and how to prevent it."

[Ba[R]aD`]

i had the same issue with my deck and pc not syincing an maybe lost 1 an a half levels
just stopped playing on pc