That feeling when you overwrote a save

[Viidi]

I played like this: I saved, turned on /editor, made a block, and blueprinted it. Then I loaded the save and placed the blueprint. And then one day I clicked save instead of load... Looking for some sympathy...

[Khagan]

Looking for some sympathy...

Don't look for sympathy, look for a backup. And if you don't keep backups, you are at risk of much worse than loosing a game blueprint.

[Gergely]

If you use Steam Cloud, you can view the cloud stored saves for Factorio and back them up. Steam syncs them after the game is closed, but if you just overwrote a save and it is still running you can try this.

Yes, this has happened to me too before. Fortunately I was already aware of this method back then.

[Qon]

If you aren't spending too much time in editor then your oldest quicksave might have had pre-/editor state. And there's the ability to periodically add a version number or date or something on your save file name so that you have something to go back to in case you break things.

Or just revert the modifications to your base with editor mode and then turn editor mode off and pretend it never happened. Who cares anyways?

[mmmPI]

It's still possible to screw up despite the good advices , i just found out : Take the habit to name your tests on the editor "Test Train XX" , everytime you make a test during 1 or 2 hour let say, you will increment, easy to find the most recent, but each increment is used for a map that is not the continuation of the save game that has the previous increment. So one time you prepare "Test Train 5", click save too fast, and realize it should have been "Test Train 6" because there was already a "Test Train 5" from the day before.

The moment of realization feel like : "why did the screen showed up very quickly a colored background picture instead of gray before i clicked ? "

This is because while you are writing "Test Train" , and no save game has the name "T" or "Te" or "Tes" and so on, it stay gray, and only when you put the last digit it shows the background of the savegame that is going to be overwritten, and then there is no warning that the save will be overwritten, just pressing enter after the digit is making you commit the overwrite and left wondering what has been lost.

The "no warning" is unforgiving, i knew it, yet it still get me sometimes, for information my save game are usually called MAP MODPACK XXX where XXX are the increment and it goes from 1 to 100 or 200..., i'm never overwriting usually, just deleting all those that end by some number when i want to free up space, i would prefer a warning, it would not get in the way of my current habits.

[coppercoil]

In such moment i feel like: "why the hell devs cannot add two lines of the code, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"

Code: Select all

if (std::filesystem::exists(new_file_name))
    std::filesystem::rename(new_file_name, "rescued.zip");

[Wenihal]

In such moment i feel like: "why the hell devs cannot add two lines of the code, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"

Because someone else would come and complain that they overwrote rescued.zip and spent 300h on this save and now 10k spm megabase is goneeeee. Halp please!!11

[Pi-C]

In such moment i feel like: "why the hell devs cannot add two lines of the code, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"

Because someone else would come and complain that they overwrote rescued.zip and spent 300h on this save and now 10k spm megabase is goneeeee. Halp please!!11

Adding a variable prefix/suffix to the name could work, e.g. "_rescued_$DATE-$TIME". If the file name already contains a string like that at the start or end of the name, don't add another prefix/suffix, but update "$DATE-$TIME" of the one already existing. Of course, this probably would take a bit more than just two lines of code.

[coppercoil]

Because someone else would come and complain that they overwrote rescued.zip and spent 300h on this save and now 10k spm megabase is goneeeee. Halp please!!11

No. If accident overwrite is 0.1%, so accident double overwrite is 0.0001%. You can ignore such numbers. Nevertheless, making few backup files is not a problem at all.

Adding suffixes is the next step of polishing the feature. Of course there will be more than two lines of code, but those lines are easy to write

[mmmPI]

Because someone else would come and complain that they overwrote rescued.zip and spent 300h on this save and now 10k spm megabase is goneeeee. Halp please!!11

No. If accident overwrite is 0.1%, so accident double overwrite is 0.0001%. You can ignore such numbers. Nevertheless, making few backup files is not a problem at all.

but then maybe you're 10x likely to make accidental overwrite when tired, and also 10x more likely when angry, which leaves a combo where tired player accidentally overwrite gets angry about it and then tired and now angry player makes a second mistake while trying to fix the first one, that one player that play video game to relax when tired and angry post on the forum about that thing that keeps happening ...

i don't think there can be a 100% foolproof mechanism, most warnings about overwrite are either useless because you can skip them accidentally with keyboard when tired or angry or both or those are annoying because you need to move the mouse and click and it gets in the way most of the time that's why i don't overwrite (on purpose)in the first place as a habits from also other games as such i'm in the side of people who would prefer a warning but i think most people have a few saves and they overwrite them in cycle similar to the autosaves.

The hidden "rescued" .zip with time could work as a vey safe mechanism, i think that's how most public servers do , but i think most solo players that have a few saves overwritten in cycle do it for memory usage reason.

[nethus]

it looks like there already is some kind of mechanism to prevent you from overwriting a saved game:

factorio save.png (45.16 KiB) Viewed 1027 times

[mmmPI]

it looks like there already is some kind of mechanism to prevent you from overwriting a saved game:

This is correct , as i said i usually don't purposedly overwrite files, it puzzled me, i didn't even know it was a thing, IN FREEPLAY, , because i can tell you this doesn't show up in editor tests, i did overwrote save game of train testings, so maybe i should have said instead of wishing there was a warning for overwrite "in general", that i wish that warning for overwrite extend to when the player is in editor mode...

[coppercoil]

it looks like there already is some kind of mechanism to prevent you from overwriting a saved game:

There is no warning if you overwrite the same game file (the same seed), which is valid action. Nobody knows have you mistyped or not.

[mmmPI]

That make sense because many of my test were made using the same empty map as base, with bot speed lvl 100 or something that i have cheated, and then i would test things name it Train test 1, and reload the same base map, test another config name Train test 2 and so on, and i could then overwrite one test without warning in that case.